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( SCATTERS FROM HER PICTURED URN 
\\l TH0U6HTS THAT 8flEATHE AND WORDS j 
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Library of Congress; 



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I^^qUNITED STATES OF AMERICA. : 

W^l^ 9—167 , j^- 



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California Anthology: 



OR 



Striking ihoiights on Many i hemes, 



CAREFULLY SELECTED FROM 



California Writers and Speakers, 



OSCAR T. SHUCK. 



(lOMPILRR OK THE "CALIFORNIA SCRAP BOOK" AND EDITOR OF 

" Rkprksf.ntativr Men of thf. Pacific." 



SAN FRANCISCO: 

From tite Prkss of BARRY & BAIRD, 419 Sacramento St. 

A. .J. Lrary, Publisher, 402 and 404 Sansome St. 

18 80. 






54638 



EnTKRBJ), ACCORniNG TO ACT 01' CONGRKSS, IN TIIK YEAR 1880, 

By OSCAR T SHUCK, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



I VENTURE TO INSCRIBE 



TH IS VOLUME 



Distinguished Citizen of California, 

A CONSPICUOUS PILLAR, AND A FORMER 
GOVERNOR, OF THE STATE, 



WUOSli PERMISSIOX, ON ACCOl ST OF lilS ABSENCE IN EUROPE, I IIAVE 
NOT BEES ABLE TO SOLICIT, 



The HON. LELAND STANFORD, 

NOTED ALIKE FOR THE HEA1.TH FULNESS OF HIS PUBLIC SPIRIT 
AND THE PURITY OF HIS PRIVATE LIFE. 

The Editor. 



Names of Writers and Speakers Quoted ix 
THIS Volume. 



Anderson, Rkv. T. H. B. 
Baker, Gex. E. D. 
Baldwin, Joseph G. 
Bancroft, Hubert H. 
Barnes, Gen. W. H. L. 
Barstow, George 
Bartlett, W. C. 
Bausman, "William 
Bell, Samuel B. 
Bennett, Nathaniel 
Bonte, Rev. J. H. C. 
Booth, Newton 
Bierce, a. G. 
Briggs, Rev. M. C. 
Browne, J. Ros.s 
Bunker, Wm. M. 
Burnett, Peter H. 
Casserly, Eugene 
Clarke, Chas. Russell 
Collins, Gen. John A 
Coolbrith, Ina D. 
Cooper, Sarah B. 
Craddock, Chas. F. 
Crittenden, R. D. 
Curtls, N. Greene 
Dall, W. H. 
Davidson, Prof. George 
Deerixg, F. p. 
DwiNELLE, John W. 
Ewer, Rev. F. C. 
Felton, John B. 
Field, Judge Stephen J. 
Finney, Selden J. 
Fisher, Philip M- 
Fitch, Thomas 



FooTE, Gen. L. H. 
Freelon, T. W. 
Fremont. Gen. J. C. 
George, Henry' 
Goodman, Joseph T. 
Gordon, Georgk 
Gray, Dr. Henry M. 
Guard, Rev. Thomas 
Hallidie, a. S. 
Hamilton, Rev. L. 
Harmon, J. B. 
Harte, F. Bret 
Hayes, William 
Highton, Henry E. 
Howard, J. G. 
hurlbut, g. c. 
Ijams, Rev. W. E. 
Kellogg, Prof. Martin 
Kendall, W. A. 
Kewen, Col. E. J. C. 
King, Thomas Starr 
Latham, Milton S. 
Le Conte, Prof. John 
Le Conte, Prof. Joseph 
Marshall, E. C. 
McDonald, Da. R. H. 
McDougall, Gen. Jas. A. 
McKin.stry, Judge. E. W. 
Montgomery, Zachary 
Moore, George R. 
Neale, Mrs. James 
O'CoNNELL, Daniel 
Pixley, F. M. 
Platt, Rev. William H. 
Pratt, Judge L. E. 



NAMES OF WRITERS AND SPEAKERS. 



Pratt, Judge 0. C. 

PPvOFFATT, Johx 

Randolph, Edmund 
Redding, B. B. 
Reid, Henry H. 
Rhodus, W. H. 
Robinson, Tod 

ROYCE, JoSIAH 

Sargent, A. A. 
Scott, Rev. Dr. W. A. 
Shafter, Jas. McM. 
Shattuck, Judge D. O. 
Shinn, Charles H. 
Shore, Dr. J. C. 
Shurtleff, Dr. G. A. 
Sill, E. R. 

Skidmore, Miss H. M. 
Soule, Frank 
Speer, Rev. William 
Stanford, Leland 
St^vnly, Edward 



Stebbins, Rev. H. 
Stoddard, Chas. Warren 
Stone, Rev. Dr. A. L. 
Stout, Dr. A. B. 
Stuart, Hector A. 
Sullivan, Francis J. 
Sumner, Chas. A. 
Swift, John F. 
TiLFORD, Frank 
Tompkins, Edward 
Tuthill, Dr. Franklin 
Upham, M. J. 
Waite, E. G. 
Warwick, J. H. 
Wattson, John V. 
Wheeler, Judge E. D. 
WiNANS, Joseph W. 
WiNCHELL, Judge E. C. 
Williams, Samuel 
Wilson, Samuel M. 



GENERAL DIVISIONS. 



I'ART. Page. 

I. Science axd Art, ...... 9 

II. LiTEKATURE AND EDUCATION, ... 49 

III. The Conduc .• of Life, . . . - . 83 

IV. Religion and the Future Life, - - 131 
V. The Farm and Garden, - - - - 157 

VI. Society and the State, - - - - 181 

VII. Fraternal Societies, . . . - . 2G1 

V^III. Distinguished Men, ----- 299 

IX. C'aliforniana, - - - - - - -3G1 

X. Miscellany, .--..- 391 



PREFACE 



As a labor of love, in my leisure hours, I have 
gathered from all ijarts of the Golden State a varied 
collection of jirecious gems. All of these had sparkled 
for a time in the public eye, but the lapse of years had 
left most of them hidden away between faded leaves — 
consigned to the "dust and silence of the upper shelf." 
I have brouglit them forth again, their luster still un- 
dimmed, and have given them new setting in a single 
cluster, with the two-fold motive of securing their com- 
mon preservation, and enhancing their beauty and value 
by making their contrasted colors emit intenser light. 
They are distinctively and exclusively Californian. I 
proffer them to an appreciative public. They are the 
jewels of others, only the setting is mine. 

O. T. S. 

Sa7i Francisco, A^ig. ist, iS^Ck 



I. 

SCIENCE AND ART. 



PART I. 



SCIENCE AND ART. 



1. Oh, Science! Thou thought-clad leader of the 
company of pure and great souls that toil for their race 
and love their kind ; measurer of the depths of earth 
and the recesses of heaven; apostle of civilization, 
handmaid of religion, teacher of human equality and 
human right, perpetual witness for the divine wisdom — 
be ever, as now, the great minister of peace! Let thy 
starry brow and benign front still gleam in the van of 
progress, brighter than the sword of the conqueror, and 
welcome as the light of heaven. — Gen. E. D. Baker. 

2. Science Destroys Not, But Fulfills. — The 
end and mission of science is not only to discover 
new truth, but also, and even more distinctively, 
to give new and more rational form to old truth — to 
transfigure the old into the more glorious form of the 
new. Science is come not to destroy, but, aided by a 
rational philosophy, to fulfill all the noblest aspirations, 
the most glorious hopes of our race. Sometimes, in- 
deed, the change which she brings about may be like a 
metamorphosis — the useless shell is burst and cast off and 
a more beautiful and less gross form appears, but still 



10 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

it is always a process of evolution — of derivation. We 
never shall reach a rational philosophy until we recog- 
nize this fundamental truth. The nczu must include the 
old. the old must incorporate and assimilate the new, 
and each must modify and be modified by the other. 
Progress in all things — in geology, in society, in phi- 
losophy — is by evolution and growth. — Prof. Joseph 
LeConte. 

3. Science the Student of Nature. — The writ- 
ings of the metaphysicians, from the earliest dawn of 
scientific inquiry, have done much to retard the pro- 
gress of the physical sciences, which were classified by 
them as belonging to an inferior sphere of intellectual 
pursuits; and it is not the least merit of the mathema- 
ticians of the last and present centuries to have pricked 
that bubble, and by the immense discoveries to which 
the calculus has given rise, to' have shown the superi- 
ority and practical utility of their method. The true 
philosophy of nature must have nature for its basis, and 
apply to it the scientific discipline. It consists in ap- 
plying the reasoning faculties of the mind to the rational 
conception of cause and effect in the infinite variety of 
natural phonomena. Whenever philosophy leaves na- 
ture as the object of its inquiries, when the mind of the 
philosopher attempts to contemplate itself as an object, 
independent of the natural phenomena which are con- 
nected with and reflected from it, he sets himself an im- 
possible task, and begins to reason in a circle. The 
conception of the grandeur, order, harmony, and nnity 
of nature, whether it acts on an infinitely great, or an 
infinitely small scale, is the true end of all human phi- 



SCIENCE AND ART. 11 

losophy, as the knowledge of the laws of nature is the 
true means of increasing the happiness and power of 
the human race. — Milton S. Latham. 

4. A Progress Steady and Serene. — Amid the 
cyclical movement of society, the rise and fall of nations 
and civilizations, the flux and reflux of opinions, the 
revolutions of all kinds, which agitate, like a seething 
cauldron, the popular mind, science alone — because it is 
the simplest and purest embodiment of the human in- 
tellect, unaffected by the passions which mingle with all 
other pursuits — science alone, among all human works, 
moves steadily onward and upward, ever increasing in 
grandeur and beauty. Like a magnificent temple, 
grandly and steadily it rises, under the busy hands of 
thousands of eager workers, the greatest monument of 
human genius. — Pi'-of. Jos. LcContc. 

6. Scientific Methods. — Scientific methods bear 
the same relation to intelledtial progress which ma- 
chines, instruments, tools, do to material progress. 
The civilized man is not superior to the savage in 
physical strength. The wonderful mechanical results 
achieved by civilized man are possible only by the use 
of mechanical contrivances. So, also, the scientists dif- 
fer from the unscientific not by any superior intellec- 
tual power. The astounding intellectual results 
achieved by science have been attained wholly by the 
use of intellectual contrivances, called methods. As in 
the lower sphere of material progress, the greatest bene- 
factors of our race are the inventors or perfecters of 
new mechanical contrivances or machines; so in the 



12 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

higher sphere of intellectual progress the greatest 
benefactors of our race are the inventors or perfectcrs 
of new intellectual contrivances, or methods. — Pi'of. 
Jos. LcCoiitc. 

6. Proclaiming Truth, Science enriches Fancy. 
The most casual observation is sufficient to convince 
every reflective mind that in the present century we 
feel the necessity of reconciling the worlds of reason 
and imagination. This reconciliation cannot be 
effected in a moment; it must be the result of repeated 
and prolonged efforts. In this work of establishing 
harmony between these two great faculties of the soul 
it is evident that science is destined to play a very im- 
portant part. Whenever old and deep-rooted errors 
are exploded by the increase of knowledge, a feeling of 
insecurity arises in the ill-instructed multitude. The 
half-educated pretender gladly embraces the opportu- 
nity to promulgate his narrow-minded views; doubt, 
scepticism and infidelity, with regard to all intellectual 
questions, take the place of security, faith and 
mental repose. Hence arises that strange dread, pos- 
sessed by so many, of the results of science; a dread 
which threatens to destroy that world which their faith 
and feeling for the beautiful had created. They are 
thus consigned to a state of vacuity and nothingness, 
which would indeed be lamentable and fearful, were it 
unavoidable. The triumphant conquests of science 
which give us the purest pleasure are, for such unhappy 
beings, no less than the dangerous approaches of a des- 
olating foe. The source of the evil must be sought in 
the ignorance of the true principles of science and in 



SCIENCE AND ART. 13 

the weakness of man's faith in the eternal and inde- 
structible nature of truth. When the former ideas of 
the physical universe are broken up, there is a period 
of insecurity and mistrust, in which even the more 
thoughtful of men feel a vague apprehension that the 
enlargement of the empire of reality must necessarily 
contract the domains in which the creative powers of 
fancy delight to rove. It seems to me that such a view 
is based upon a misconception of the subject. For it 
is evident that each step that we make in the more inti- 
mate knowledge of science, leads us to the threshold 
of new labyj-inths. The circle of illumination is en- 
larged; but the shadowy, half-transparent, vapor- veiled 
circumference, by which it is perpetually bordered, 
incessantly recedes before the eyes of the enquirer, con- 
stituting a fairy-land where imagination revels and 
lends a definite outline to the ever unfolding manifesta- 
tions of ideal creation. Thus it is, that every acces- 
sion to the sciences enriches the fields of fancy by bring- 
ing new mysteries within their sphere, and opening to 
them higher and more soul-elevating sources of enjoy- 
ment. — Prof, yohn LeConte. 

7. Truth the Guiding Star of Science. — So 
far as my observation goes, — so far as my intercourse 
with men of scientific pursuits teaches me. Science is 
the embodiment and personification of peace. Its very 
existence is the issue of calm experiment, persistent in- 
vestigation, and deliberate thought. It seeks no bub- 
ble reputation at the cannon's mouth ; no ephemeral 
glory in the fierce conflict of politics. It is born, bred 
and nurtured in the serene quietness of Nature. 



14 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

The devotees of Science are warriors only in an- 
other sense, — they dare be true, earnest and brave 
in the pursuit of true knowledge ; and firm, steadfast, 
and unyielding in maintaining that which is demon- 
strated. 

Men of original research in Science are in the fullest 
sense of the word Discoverers, forced to traverse the 
great ocean of illogical thought and imperfect observa- 
tion ; and when they reach the shores of Investigation, 
it is an essential part of their undertaking to burn 
their ships of early prejudice, of traditional supersti- 
tions, and of inconsequent learning. 

Their guiding star in all research, in all deduction, is 
Truth, — and Truth for Truth's sake alone. The strug- 
gle for mastery over the errors of the earlier educa- 
tion is intense, and can only be fully understood by 
those who have conquered. And yet as new relations 
in Nature are unfolded, the observer soon finds the 
scales of defective teachinjjs falling- from his mental 
vision, and he is impelled by the very truthfulness of 
his work to urge his labors, and to gather into consecu- 
tive order the fruits of his discoveries. 

And it must be gratifying to every teacher of youth, 
and of older acje — ^I mean teachers in the broadest 
terms which the word will admit — the preacher, the 
artist, the professor, the actor — to know how the moral 
sense of truth is enlarged, intensified, and attuned by 
the very effort of investigation and deduction. I can 
fancy no other occupation except that of the mathema- 
tician, that will, in its workings alone, bear comparison 
with original research in thus developing one of the 



SCIEN'CE AND ART. 15 

highest attributes of our present condition. And the 
spread of this taste for examination is to me the most 
hopeful sign in an age when charlatans in many profes- 
sions are endeavoring to cut loose the moorings of pub- 
Lc and private morals. 

The history of the Inductive Sciences abounds in 
examples and lessons bearing pertinently upon the po- 
sition and relations of discovery with society at large ; 
and it would appear pedantic even to mention the early 
observers in astronomy and physics ; investigators 
whose advances were notedly marked by the long and 
persistent opposition which they encountered. The 
" warfare " was decidedly one-sided ; the aggressors 
were assuredly not the investigators ; nevertheless, the 
attacks of prejudice, of scholastic dogmatism, of unrea- 
soning credulity, were powerless to stay the march of 
deduced Truth. 

Almost in our own time we have had presented to 
us several remarkable fields of investigation that were 
held and entrenched by the blindest faith, and nothing 
but the unwaverinof labor of the investigator has drawn 
light and truth from them. 

With the opening of the present century there dawned 
a new era in Palaeontology; a few clear minds had 
caught its whisperings, and it has emerged a science. 
The previous investigators had indeed been in advance 
'of their times, but the modes of independent thought 
had not then been fully developed; and moreover, their 
conclusions were warped and trammelled by the same 
causes that had so long repressed the acceptance of the 
new cosmogony. But the clear truths of discovery 



16 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

accumulated, and of necessity the earlier education was 
pushed aside whenever and wherever it stood in con- 
flict with the deductions of the bolder thinking. System 
now guides investigation, and method has constructed 
coherent and more comprehensive theories. To-day 
there is admitted no "sports of nature " on the palseon- 
tological record, but order, succession, and inevitable 
law. The stratigraphical record of the earth is now read 
as certainly, if not so easily, as the hieroglyphics of 
Egypt, or the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria. 

It seemed almost seeking and courting the condem- 
nation of the so-called " learned professions " when the 
Archaeologist first propounded the proofs of man's early 
existence on the face of the earth; and yet the searchers 
after truth have brought such evidences of his presence 
here, even before the last glacial period, that only the 
" doubting Thomases " can fail to see the import and 
weight of their investigations. Very much more re- 
mains to be done before the " mint stamp " is placed 
upon any given archaeological theory ; but the stream 
of evidence gathers volume and momentum, and will 
yet carry the law with it. 

And in the " new chemistry " is it not remarkable 
what great strides have been taken, and what broader 
horizons have been opened before us, in the investiga- 
tions and illustrations of "the Molecular Theory?" 
The old atom of our student days still claims and still 
holds a qualified existence, but the wonderful microcosm 
of the " molecule " has immensely enlarged the views 
of the physicist, and enabled him to almost penetrate 
the arcana of ultimate matter. The mathematician 



SCIENCE AND ART. 17 

sees in it the opportunity for the legitimate application 
of his analysis, and we may rest assured, from the pres- 
ent progress in the examination, that he will ultimately 
master the problem. And curiously enough, in this 
branch of science, the modern investigator has trodden 
upon the domain of the metaphysician, and shown that 
the infinite divisibility of matter is a phantasm of 
the brain of the closet philosopher ; for the atom and 
the molecule have their sizes determinable. By direct 
experiment, also, the chemist has placed three distinct 
bodies of the same volume in the space occupied by 
one of them ; and again confounded the " inner con- 
sciousness " of the metaphysical dreamer. 

In the rich field of Zoology and Biology, we have 
found, and we may reasonably expect to find, more of 
the highest developments in the law of evolution, for 
the very essence and integrity of the law, in one of its 
more important phases, is ever-present within our 
means of investigation. It is comparatively young 
among the modern sciences, and yet its deductions 
point unerringly to the same pole in the heavens of 
true knowledge. 

For these sciences, and for all the others, the specialist 
must be peculiarly gifted for research ; his education 
develops as he advances; and his deductions are founded 
only upon the sequence and coherence of observed facts. 
All the streams of knowledge will flow into the same 
great channel and homologate. We may not imagine 
that channel banks-full until our race reaches a higher 
development ; we may not hear the announcement of 
the grand formula of evolution, but we experience the 



lb CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY, 

lively satisfaction of the ancient geometer, and know 
that we are on the right line of research and deduction 
towards it. And yet in our hopefulness and trustful- 
ness of the very evolution of law in the cosmos, we feel 
that at any day may arise the man and the brain to 
grasp and announce the intimate relations of all matter 
and of all forces. 

These views are not confined to the scientist ; you 
know that, in one shape or another, they are permeat- 
ing the earth. The war-cries of dogmatism, of imper- 
fect education, of unquestioning faith, may be raised 
against them, but the world " still moves." 

The discovery of America was an epoch of restless 
inquiry, and opened a fresh field for growth and culti- 
vation of free thought and free deductions ; the activity 
of the last century has wonderfully accelerated their 
exposition ; and to-day our children are starting where 
we are leaving off. 

To every teacher of youth, to every adviser of ma- 
turer age and thought, the newer education must come 
in direct conflict with part of their earlier and more 
contracted education ; and they must abandon the dicta 
of mere " schools " and teach these higher laws of 
science, or be dragged at the wheels of irresistible men- 
tal and moral progress. — Prof. Geo. Davidson. 

8. Science Knows not Prejudice or Passion. — It 
is the felicity of the scientific man, that the truth he seeks 
is cosmopolitan. It knows not state or nation, tribe or 
race, but is world-truth and world-law. The distin- 
guished representatives of that truth have a clear at- 



SCIENCE AND ART. 19 

mosphere, and if their moral nature is strong enough 
to sustain itself in those rarified heights, they lead a 
life of singular dignity and freedom, their minds dashed 
with no color of prejudice or passion — seeking what is. 
To know what is in the world of things, is the vocation 
of the man of science. His reputation is the reputa- 
tioi> of truth, strong and still as the sun ; and his name 
is the property of mankind. — Rev. Horatio Stebbins. 

9. The Evolution of Science and Art. — This 
age is one of science, as contra-distinguished from the 
ages of poetry, the arts, conquest and superstition. 

The Greeks, who are our masters, and the masters 
of all the succeeding ages in all that relates to sculp- 
ture, poetry, taste, refinement of thought and feeling* 
rhetoric, logic, eloquence and ideal philosophy, were 
yet children in the natural sciences, though they were 
far from beine deficient in certain branches of mathe- 
matics and were accurate observers of men and things. 

There is not a principle in abstract logic which was 
not as well understood by Aristotle as it now is by the 
most eminent in Europe or America, and no abstract 
principle of moral philosophy which .the Greeks did not 
elaborate, refine, and adorn with the elegance and grace 
of their language, and their peculiar adoration of the 
sublime and beautiful. 

But their artistic taste, and the ideality of their con- 
ceptions, rendered them far more apt to speculate on 
the natural sciences and to establish beautiful theories, 
than to go through the painful process of methodical 
investigation, aided by actual experiments. 



20 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

They were most accurate observers of nature, as far 
as the latter is revealed to the senses, and they pos- 
sessed a wonderful combination of thouofht, and reason- 
ing to draw conclusions and to build up systems ; but 
where their senses erred they necessarily arrived at 
wrong conclusions; and they had no means of following 
nature into her dark chambers of inquisition, putting 
questions to her, compelling answers and racking the 
truth from her by means of philosophical apparatus. 
They had no telescope, no microscope, no physical in- 
struments or chemical laboratories of any importance, 
and the mechanical arts were not sufficiently advanced 
to furnish either. 

The heroes of the Iliad knew neither iron nor steel ; 
they fought their battles with arms made of copper, and 
the accomplished Aspasia, though decked with gems of 
art which our modern cameo cutters would vainly imi- 
tate, knew neither gauze, silk, nor muslin. 

Considering the limited means of observation and 
construction possessed by the Greeks, they achieved 
wonders in the correct classification of phenomena and 
their accurate description of them, and in the acuteness 
of the process of reasoning brought to bear upon them. 

But they had not data enough to reason from, though 
they had in many instances a presentiment of truth 
amounting almost to intuition. And to their ever- 
lasting honor be it spoken, they sought truth, merely 
for the sake of truth, on account of its divine essence 
and ennoblinp- character. 

There was no stimulus given to inventors and dis- 
coverers in the shape of patents and privileges for the 



SCIENCE AND ART. 21 

accumulation of large fortunes ; and the answer given 
by Archimedes to his pupil who wished to devote him- 
self to the divine science of mathematics, because its 
application had saved the state, furnishes a powerful 
contrast to the sordid motives which but too often gov- 
ern our modern votaries of science. 

" Science was divine," replied Archimedes, " before it 
served the state, and he who only worships her on ac- 
count of the uses to which she may be put, desecrates 
her shrine." Yet even Archimedes, with his knowledge 
of geometry, mechanics and hydraulics, would now be 
scarcely able to pass an examination for admission into 
the Polytechnic School of Paris, or rank with an under- 
graduate of the Military Academy of West Point. 

The Romans, at the period of their Greek conquest, 
were a semi-barbarous people, but naturally possessed 
of great aptitudes. They soon perceived and imitated 
the superior civilization and refinement of the Greeks, 
and as Pliny expressed it in one of his letters, " were 
in turn subdued and conquered by the vanquished." 

But the Romans never equaled the Greeks in the 
fine arts ; neither did they materially add to Greek 
science. 

They were essentially a military people, who looked 
upon themselves as the masters of the world, and upon 
the rest of mankind as tributary to their greatness. To 
carry out this view required not only great valor [virtus 
it was called) and great generalship, but also fixed prin- 
ciples of policy in regard to their neighbors and the 
peoples subjected to their rule. The Romans culti- 
vated statesmanship, and felt at an early period the 



22 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

necessity of law. The relations of property called for 
the exercise of legislative wisdom, and led to the en- 
actment of codes which have become models of legal 
reasoning to all subsequent legislators. 

The code of Justinian is still in force in many coun- 
tries in Europe, and Roman law, as an introduction to 
the study of all other law, is required in most Euro- 
pean Universities. Ng nation has elaborated the spirit 
or science of law more fully than the Romans, and if 
the legislators of England and France have found it 
expedient to vary from it in one or the other respect, it 
was done simply with a view of meeting the altered 
state of society, and the new relations of property aris- 
ing from new modes of acquisition. Leibnitz, the 
great mathematician and logician, compared the study 
of the Roman law to a course of mathematics, so vig- 
orous did he find its process of reasoning, its logical 
deductions, and its demonstrative justice. Our com- 
mon law derived from England is undoubtedly better 
adapted to the wants of a free and simple hearted peo- 
ple, for the common law is a school of freedom, a bul- 
wark against tyranny ; but no law has, like the Roman, 
so entirely met the requirements of abstract justice. 

Greeks and Romans then were our masters. Greek 
philosophy and art, and Roman law and statesmanship, 
have assisted in shaping our present civilization. But 
Greek philosophy had to be stripped of its poetical 
dress, and to Roman law had to be added the chapter 
on inalienable Inmian rights and the duties of nations 
toward each other, to prepare the further development 
of the intellectual and moral faculties of man. The 



SCIENCE AND ART. 23 

Romans had no idea of international law; no suspicion 
that a conquered nation had any rights at all, or that 
Rome had any obligation to ?. foreign nation, except 
those which were dictated by her own interests. Her 
conduct toward neutral powers and toward the con- 
quered, were alike the result of policy. 

Some of the Greek philosophers — among others, 
Socrates, in his dialogues — had much higher conceptions 
of the mutual duties and obligations of men and peo- 
ples ; but they never succeeded in having their views 
adopted, as a principle of action, either state or 
individual. In this respect our civilisation and learning 
are far in advance of the ancients, and far more in 
harmony with the general laws of nature. We have 
evidently advanced in knowledge, though we may 
remain far behind the Greeks, not only in performance, 
but also in the appreciation of the fine arts. We have 
no reason to regret this deterioration in one respect, 
and advance in another ; for, in spite of the fostering 
care bestowed by legislation on science and art, there 
is a certain antagonism between them distinctly marked 
in ihe history of each nation. 

The inspirations of the artist consist in an intuitive 
perception of truth, and in an undefined, but neverthe- 
less entire appreciation of the harmony of all created 
things. Imagination must of course elaborate each 
individual conception of the artist ; but it must always 
be in harmony with nature, or, to use a more familiar 
phrase, it must be " true to nature." The process of 
science is the reverse. Here nothing is intuition ; all 
is either analysis or synthetic reasoning from cause to 



24 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY, 

effect. Both processes are gradual, and necessarily 
exclude the influence of the imagination. In the artist, 
union of design is the first essential pre-requisite ; in 
science, union is the result of many truths combined 
into one after a long process of reasoning. The exclu- 
sion of the imagination from scientific pursuits pre- 
cludes artistic conception and vice versa. 

The arts have preceded science all over the world, 
as poetry was written before prose. Men felt truth 
before they were conscious of it, as a child learns to 
speak before it studies grammar, or as a mind may be 
logical without having paid much attention to catego- 
ries. Science consists in conscious truth, — in truth 
demonstrated. It is this latter perception of truth 
which gives man power over matter, which teaches him 
his moral and physical status in the universe, and 
brinofs him in contact with the infinite. Greek and 
Roman art flourished without rigorous perceptions of 
scientfiic truths, and painting and statuary reached the 
highest perfection of art in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, amidst grotesque superstitions, which, not- 
withstanding the great discoveries of that period, in 
more than one respect checked the progress of scientific 
pursuits. 

The first impulse to the logical pursuit of science 
was given by Bacon. Not that he established any 
particular theory or hypothesis of his own, but because 
he upset all those which had hitherto been established, 
and which had prevented all real scientific progress. 
He is the founder of experimental philosophy; that is, 
the knowledge of nature arising from certain proofs 



SCIENCE AND ART. 25 

furnished by nature herself when subjected to certain 
tests. Philosophers had ever after to deal in facts, not 
in theories ; and when these facts were not obvious to 
the senses, they had to be illustrated by actual experi- 
ments. 

Experience, not ingenious conjecture, was henceforth 
to guide the explorer of nature and her laws. The 
metamorphosis wrought by this change of system in 
the mode of reasoning on natural subjects, changed 
Astrology into Astronomy, Alchemy into Chemistry, 
and the search after the Philosopher's Stone into Min- 
eralogy and Geology. It has added many new 
branches to science, branches for which even the names 
were wanting in former ages^ and which have since led 
the way to the most important inventions, changed 
the form and aspect of the civilized world. And it has 
also shown to us that all natural sciences are intimately 
connected with each other ; that there is, in fact, but 
one great science — that of nature — and that all the sci- 
ences men have cultivated from time to time, in differ- 
ent ages, are but so many fractional parts of that uni- 
versal unit. — Milton S. Latham. 

10. The Masterbuilders in the Temple of 
Science. — In the noble army of Science — that army 
so compactly organized for the conquest of darkness 
and the extension of the empire of light — there are 
many valiant fighters, but there can be but few leaders. 
In the construction of the great temple of science — 
that eternal temple made without hands — the only tem- 
ple ever erected by man worthy to be dedicated to the 



26 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

great Author of Nature — there are many busy, eager, 
joyous workmen, but there can be but few master- 
builders. 

As we look back, over the history of science, we see, 
at long intervals, certain men who seem to tower far 
above their fellows. In what consists their greatness ? 
They are men who have introduced great ideas or nenu 
methods into science — ideas which extend the domain 
of human thought, or methods which increase our 
power over nature, facilitate the progress of discovery, 
and thus open the way to the conquest of new fields. 
Such men were Copernicus, and Galileo, and Kepler,, 
and Newton, and Herschel, in astronomy ; such were 
Linnaeus, and Buffon, and Cuvier and Agassiz, in or- 
ganic science. — Prof. Joseph LeConte. 

11. Evolution and Materialism. — It is believed 
by many that science starves all our noblest faculties, 
quenches all our most glorious aspirations, and buries 
all our heavenly hopes in the cold earth of a vulgar 
materialism. 

Now, it is indeed true, that there has been in these 
modern times a strong tendency, a current of thought, in 
the direction of materialism. It is true, too, that this- 
tendency is strongest in the domain of science, and 
among sciences, strongest of all, in biology and geology; 
but I believe it is true, also, that this is only a passing 
phase of thought, an ephemeral fashion of philosophy. 
As a sympathizer with the age in which I live, still 
more as a scientist, and most of all as a biologist and 
geologist, I have felt the full force of this tendency. 



SCIENCE AND ART. 27 

In this stream of tendency I have stood, during all my 
active life, just where the current ran swiftest, and con- 
fess to you that I have been sometimes almost swept 
off my feet. But it is the duty of every independent 
thinker not to yield blindly to the spirit of the age, but 
to exercise his own unprejudiced reason ; not to float 
and drift, but to stand. 

I wish frankly to acknowledge that I am myself an 
evolutionist. I may not agree with most that evolu- 
tion advances always citm ccqtio pcdc. On the contrary, 
I believe that there have been periods of slow and 
periods of rapid, almost paroxysmal, evolution. I may 
not agree with most that we already have in Darwinism, 
the final form, and in survival of the fittest, the prime 
factor of evolution. On the contrary, I believe that 
the most important factors of evolution are still un- 
known — that there are more and crreater factors in 

o 

evolution than are dreamed of in the Darwinian phi- 
losophy. Nevertheless, evolution is a grand fact,, 
involving alike every department of nature ; and more 
especially evolution of the organic kingdom and the 
origin of species by derivation, must be regarded as an 
established truth of science. But remember, evolution 
is one thing and materialism another and quite a differ- 
ent thing. The one is a sure result of science ; the 
other a doubtful inference of philosophy. Let no one 
who is led step by step through the paths of evolution, 
from the mineral to the organic, from the organic to the 
animate, and from the animate to the rational, until he 
lands logically, as he supposes, into blank and universal 
materialism ; let no such one, I say, imagine for a 



■28 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

moment that he has been walking all the way in the 
domain of science. He has stepped across the boundary 
of science into the domain of philosophy. Yet the step 
seems so easy, so natural, so inevitable, that most do 
not distinguish between the teachings of science and 
the inference of philosophy, and thus the whole is 
unjustly accredited to science. — Prof. Jos. LeConte. 

12. Evolution the Grandest Idea of Modern 
Science. — Evolution is certainly the grandest idea of 
modern science, embracing alike every department of 
nature. The law of evolution is as universal as the 
■law of gravitation. The one is the universal law of 
time, as the other is of space. In its widest and truest 
sense, evolution constitutes the subject matter of at 
least one-half of all science. 

Now, in this wide sense, there can be no doubt of 
the evolution of the organic kingdom. There may be, 
■and in fact there is, much difference of opinion as to 
the causes or factors of evolution — there may be, and 
in fact there is, much difference of opinion as to the 
rate of evolution, whether always uniform or often more 
or less paroxysmal ; but of the fact of progressive 
movement of the whole organic kingdom to higher and 
higher conditions, and that the laws of the progressive 
movement are similar to those which determine the 
movement in all evolution, there is no longer any doubt. 
These formal laws of continuous movement — e. g., the 
law of differentiation, the law of progress, etc. — these 
are the really grand things about the evolution theory, 
and for these we are indebted to Agassiz, Yes, Agassiz, 



SCIENCE AND ART. 29* 

althoug-h he, to his latest utterances, contested modern 
views, was himself the great founder and apostle of 
evolution. All the laws of the evolution of the organic 
kingdom, as now recognized, were announced by him. 
His whole life and stren";th were devoted to enforcino: 
and illustrating these laws, although he denied the exist-, 
ence of any discoverable cause except the Great First 
Cause. To him the organic kingdom seemed a great 
work of art, wrought out through inconceivable time 
to higher and more perfect conditions, according to a 
plan predetermined in the mind of God ; and he was 
undoubtedly right. Darwin, on the other hand, at- 
tempted to discover the secondary causes by means of 
which this marvellous result was attained. To him 
the organic kingdom, as a whole, was a great and 
complex organism developing under the operation of 
resident forces; and he also, as I conceive, was right 
Agassiz announced 3\\ formal laws oi the universe of 
time as Kepler did those of the universe of space ; he 
was the legislator of the dark abyss behind us. as 
Kepler was of the overarching abyss above us. — Prof. 
Jos. LeConte. 

13. Evolution not Ungodly. — There are three 
corresponding views in regard to the origin of the 
individual,— of you, of me, of each of us. The first is 
that of the little innocent, who thinks God made him 
as he (the little innocent) makes dirt-pies\ the second 
is that of the little hoodlum, who says, " I wasn't made 
at all, I growed ;" the third is the usual adult belief- — 
that we are made by a process of evolution. Do you. 



so CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

not observe, then, that in the matter of the origin of 
species, many good theologians and pietists are in the 
position of the httle innocent ? They think that 
species were made zaitkotit natural process. On the 
other hand, most evolutionists are in the position of the 
little hoodlum ; for they think that species, because they 
^'growed" werent made at all. But there is a higher 
and more rational philosophy than either, which holds 
that the ideas of making and of growing are not incon- 
sistent with each other — that evolution does not and 
cannot destroy the conception of, or the belief in, an 
intelligent Creator and Author of the Cosmos. This 
view combines and reconciles the two preceding antag- 
onistic views, and is therefore more comprehensive, 
more rational, and more true. But let us not fail to do 
justice — let us not overlook the fact that the most 
important and noblest truths are overlooked only by 
the hoodlum and materialist. Of the two sides of the 
.shield, the little innocent and the pietist sees, at least, 
.the whiter and more beautiful. — Prof. Jos. LeConte. 

14. Science and Art Omnipotent. — Science and 
Art flourish best in a Republican soil. Their achieve- 
ments are of no hot house growth. Where the human 
mind is left free to grapple with Nature, the contest is 
unequal The intrepid Franklin grasped the motive 
power of the Universe. Morse, the artist-philosopher, 
tamed and subdued it into obedience, and endowed it 
with thought and speech. Swift as the flash of God's 
eye, and in mysterious silence, the thought of one 
hemisphere is uttered in the other. The events of 



SCIENCE AND ART. 31 

to-day are matters of history to-morrow. Space is 
annihilated, and time is no more. The intensity and 
activity of our existence are truly appalling. Omnipo- 
tence, a grand and fearful attribute of Deity, has been 
usurped by man. The elements are subjected to his 
will, and perform the most menial services. The winds 
and waves are set at defiance, and commerce and 
humanity rejoice at the achievements of steam. Labor, 
the great element of Democracy, has been elevated to 
a Science, and its light illuminates the workshops of 
the world. The hand of invention strikes the shackle 
from toiling millions. — yohn V. Wattson. 

IB. Great Ideas in Science. — Let me illustrate 
the effect of the introduction of great ideas into science. 
I will select one example from astronomy, and one from 
geology. 

Before the time of Copernicus and Galileo, this, our 
earth, was all of space for us. Sun, moon, and stars 
were but little satellites revolving about us at incon- 
siderable distances. Astronomy then was but the geome- 
try of the heavens, the geometry of the curious lines 
traced by these wandering fires on the concave of 
heaven. But. with the first glance through the telescope, 
the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter re- 
vealed the existence of other worlds beside our own. 
In that moment the fundamental idea of modern as- 
tronomy, the idea of infinite space filled with worlds 
like our own, was fully born in the mind of Galileo. In 
that moment the intellectual vision of man was infinitely 
extended. 



32 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Aeain, before the time of Bufifon and Cuvi'er, this^ 
our human epoch, the history of our race, was all of 
time for us. Shells and other remains of marine animals, 
had, indeed, been found far in the interior of the conti- 
nents, and high up the slopes of mountains, and there 
had been much speculation as to their origin. Some 
may have thought by means of these to extend the 
limits of our epoch, but none dreamed of other epochs- 
Some may have thought they were discovering newcoast 
islands along the shores, but none dreamed that these 
were the evidences of new worlds in the infinite abyss, 
of time. It was reserved for Buffon and Cuvier first 
to recoenize the entire difference between fossil and 
living species. In that moment was born the funda- 
mental idea of geology, the idea of infinite time con- 
taining many successive epochs, or time-worlds like our 
own. In that moment the intellectual horizon of man 
was again infinitely extended. 

These two are the grandest moments in the history 
of science; yea, in the intellectual history of our race. 
The one opened the gates of infinite space, and showed 
us many space worlds; the other opened up the gates 
of infinite time, and showed us as many successive 
creations or time-worlds. 

We see, then, the intellectual impulse communicated 
by a great new idea. — Prof. Jos. LcConte. 

16. O, Science ! high-priest of truth, interpreter of 
nature, explorer of the infinite ! unto whom it is given, 
to walk upon the waters of the deep, to tread the 
ocean's bed, to pass through furnaces of fire, to kiss 



SCIENCE AND ART. 33 

the burning lips of the crater, to play with the thunder- 
bolts of heaven, and to cleave thy bright way among 
the everlasting stars ! We greet thee as the sovereign 
genius of a wide and widening realm. Pursue thy 
glorious march of conquest, multiply thy triumphs and 
enlarge thy dominion, giving to humanity thy garnered 
fruits, and ever leading us to higher planes of knowl- 
edge. So may we keep in harmony with God's will. — 
Oscar T. Shuck. 

Y7 . Chemistry, youngest daughter of the Sciences, 
born amidst flame, and cradled in billows of fire! — 
W. H. Rhodes. 

18. The Great Scientific Explorer. — In the 
darkness of the night, from his vessel's prow, Colum- 
bus saw wavinof licfhts in front of him, which the 
dawn of morn showed him to come from regions 
new and undiscovered, but which had been so near 
him in the night, that he had scented the perfume 
of the trees and flowers. And so I doubt not the 
eager searcher for truth, the Columbus of Science, has 
often seen in the darkness of this life, glimmering 
lights from the other world — lights which the morning 
of immortality has revealed to him as coming from 
regions which had been so near to him in the night of 
life, that even then a little more light, a little more range 
of organs, would have discovered them. It has often 
seemed to me that the great scientific man, after death, 
must have started to find how near he was, when in 
this world, to the discovery of the whole secret of 

being. Often I have imagined such a one saying to 
3 



34 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

himself: "Why, this great truth was hidden in facts 
long familiar to me in my studies on earth. This great 
mechanism, every spring of which I now comprehend, 
simple as is all the mechanism of God, needed but one 
more generalization ; one more syllogism ; one more 
bold effort of the reason, and I had found it out, even 
with the dull organs of mortality. — John B. Felton. 

19. The winds of heaven trample down the pines, 
Or creep in lazy tides along the lea; 

Leap the wild waters from the smitten rock, 
Or crawl with childish babble to the sea; 

But why the tempests out of heaven blow, 
Or what the purpose of the seaward flow. 

No man hath known, and none shall ever know. 

Why seek to know ? To follow Nature up 
Against the current to her source, why care } 

Vain is the toil; he's wisest still who knows 
All science is but formulated prayer — 

Prayer for the warm winds and the quickening rain, 
Prayer for sharp sickle and for laboring wain, 

To gather from the planted past the grain. — 

A. G. Bierce. 

20. No Antagonism between Science and Re- 
ligion. — I am ready to say and boldly maintain that 
there is not, and cannot be, any real antagonism or 
controversy between true science and true religion. 
All truth is of God, and is a unit. Science and religion 
are twin sisters from the throne of the Eternal Law- 
giver. There is no real controversy between them — 



SCIENCE AND ART. 35 

no Strife but as to which branch of knowledge can do 
most for mankind. Properly interpreted, they come 
from the same glorious hand and tend to the same 
result — the happiness of mankind and the glory of the 
Creator. I honor science, and heartily bid God-speed 
to every honest investigator of the laws of the universe. 
As a theologian, I have never had the slightest fear 
concerning the advance of true science. Our natural 
philosophers cannot travel so far, but they will find the 
Creator has been there before them; and as they climb 
through space and journey among planets and systems 
unnumbered, they will all find that the ladder by which 
they have ascended to the very outposts of the universe 
was built for them by the hand of an all-wise Law- 
giver, possessed of supreme intelligence, will, and 
power. — Rev. Dr. IV. A. Scott. 

21. Essentially there is no conflict between re- 
ligion and science, and never can be. Their boundaries 
are undefined, as the boundaries between the known and 
the unknown, the apprehended and the comprehended, 
always will be. — Rev. Horatio Stebbins. 

22. Fine art has an ideal which it seeks to embody. 
Morphology also has an ideal {the archetype) which it 
seeks to discover. The ideal of art is that toward which 
all nature ceaselessly strives, — the ideal of science, that 
fro?n which all nature is ceaselessly u7ifolded. Both 
must ever remain ideals at an infinite distance from us. 
We must forever approach, but can never attain them. 
For the ideal of science is to be found only in the 



36 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

eternal thoughts of God the Father — the Ideal of art 
only in the person of God the Son. Religion, more 
perfect, and far more practical than either, strives, 
through the influence of the third person, the Holy 
Spirit, to embody the same ideal, not in human thought 
nor in human works of art, but in human life and 
human character. — Prof. Joseph LeConte. 

23. Drawing. — Drawing, or the art of design, is 
often pointed at as a superfluous study. It is only 
another mode of writing ; it is the shorthand of idio- 
graphic teaching; while the hands are young and the 
fingers pliant they are the most easily trained to pre- 
cision; the picture teaches at a glance that which it 
would cost pages of verbal description to explain. The 
books of science of the present day teem with illustra- 
trations, and therein it is that the youth of this age far 
outstrip those of former years in the rapidity of their 
education. He who learns to-day will teach to-morrow, 
and to him should be given every facility with which to 
stamp his thought on paper. Let the machinist, the 
engineer, the shipbuilder, the architect, the mechanic, 
the engraver, all answer what can they do without their 
drawings and their plans ? — Dr. A. B. Stout. 

24. The Home of Art. — The home of art is 
where Nature stimulates the sensual and spiritual- 
intellectual. Art flourished under Grecian skies. In- 
spired by the spirit of beauty that dwelt where the 
chiefest joys of earth, sea, and sky were blended, the 
Parthenon arose upon the brow of the Acropolis in the 
transparent air of Attica, classic groves were adorned 



SCIENCE AND ART. 37 

with marble men, and chastest temples solemnized with 
statues of gods. As art has flourished in a zone where 
the charms of Nature invite man to their enjoyment, 
and away from anxious cares for self-preservation, so to 
the stimulation of a generous climate and its attendant 
advantages for cesthetic culture, we are to look for the 
founding of the great schools of art upon our continent. 
Where else are they to appear but on the Pacific shores 
of the Great Republic ? — -E. G. Waite. 

26. Art in California. — The little that has been 
done in California in Art is rather a sign of better 
things to come. Art must not only have inspiration, 
but it needs wealth and the society of a ripe commu- 
nity for its best estate. It is possible to paint for 
immortality in a garret; but a great deal of work done 
there has gone to the lumber-room. Not only must 
there be the fostering spirit of wealth and letters, but 
Art also needs a picturesque world without — the grand 
estate of mountains and valleys, atmospheres, tones 
lights, shadows ; and if there be a picturesque people, 
we might look for a new school of Art, and even 
famous painters. Where a poet can be inspired, there 
look also for the poetry, which is put on canvas. 

In spite of our civilization there is a great deal that 
is picturesque among the people — the Parsee, Moham- 
medan, Malay and Mongol, whom one may sometimes 
meet on the same street — the red shirt of the Italian 
fisherman, and the lateen sail which sends his boat 
flying over the water. The very distresses and dis- 
trusts of men here have made them picturesque. 



38 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Moreover the whole physical aspect of the country is 
wonderfully picturesque. The palm tree, lifting up its 
fronded head in the desert, the great fir tree, set against 
the ineffable azure of the heavens, the vine-clad hills, 
th serrated mountains, which the frosts have canonized 
with their sealed and unsealed fountains, and all the 
gold and purple which touch the hills at eventide — these 
are the full rich ministries of Nature. It may take 
Art a thousand years to ripen even here. For how 
many ages had the long procession of painters come and 
gone before Raphael and Michael Angelo appeared ? 
Our young Art school will some day have its treas- 
ures ; and there will be hung on our walls the portraits 
of other men, whose culture and influence will be worth 
more than all the gold of our mountains. Let the 
artist set up his easel and write his silent poem upon 
the canvas. Welcome all influences which soften this 
hard and barren materialism. Before the mountains 
were unvexed by the miner's drill, the land itself was 
a poem and a picture. One day the turbid streams 
will turn to crystal again, and the only miner will 
be the living glacier sitting on its white throne of 
judgment, and grinding the very mountains to pow- 
der. Fortunate they who can catch this wealth of in- 
spiration. These are the ministers and prophets whose 
larger and finer interpretation of Nature is part of 
the treasures of the new commonwealth. — W. C. 
Bartlett. 

26. Sculpture. — It is said that the ancients have 
exhausted the domain of sculpture, because they have 
delineated the human form in its greatest perfection. 



SCIENCE AND ART. 39 

They have done this and we concede it. But form 
is not all. There are also action, passion and senti- 
ment. We claim that we have advanced somewhat 
in two thousand years, and during that period have 
attained to a higher and more sentimental civilization. 
If this claim be true, then we have higher ideas and 
sentiments to express in painting and sculpture than 
had our predecessors in art, Zeuxis and Apelles, Phidias 
and Praxiteles. We may hope to equal them in the 
expression of physical beauty, and to excel them in 
moral and sentimental beauty. 

Let us, meanwile, be just to the ancients. They 
have left us so many impure and obscene remains, that 
many critics have considered them as characteristic 
specimens of th-^ir art. But a careful observation 
demonstrates that these impure remains are almost 
always in a style of art imperfect, both in design and 
execution, and that able artists would not degrade 
themselves to such subjects. Even at the Renaissance 
it is remarkable how the greatest modern artists often 
gave the grossest material interpretations to those 
mythological fables out of which the ancient Pagan 
artists constructed the most poetical conceptions. 
Titian represents Dance as purchased for the embraces 
of Jupiter by a shower of golden ducats poured into 
her lap. The Pagan artist, whose work is preserved 
at Pompeii, pictures her as an innocent maiden seated 
upon a green bank in the recesses of a garden, who 
unveils her bosom to a warm, moist mist, golden with 
the evening of sunshine, which gently wafts itself over 
her, and in this form the treacherous and seductive god 



40 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

insinuates himself beneath the folds of her drapery. 
The modern artist portrays Leda submitting herself to 
Jove, approaching her under the form of a swan in the 
grossest and most material modes. The ancient painter 
depicts a swan fleeing from a vulture, and received by 
a compassionate virgin into her bosom, and shielded 
there by her arms and beneath her garments. And we 
are constantly called upon to wonder how the great 
artists of the fourteenth century could lend themselves 
to the most material conceptions. 

To say that modern art may not excel ancient art, is 
to say that we are to make no progress in sentiment 
and idea. The ancients expressed perfectly all they 
had to express. The Greek ideal and Roman ideal 
have survived to us. The Hebrew ideal has not come 
down to us, for the Jews did not cultivate sculpture or 
painting; nor the Egyptians, because among them it 
was reduced to merely conventional and sacerdotal 
forms. But there is nothing christian nor spiritual 
in Grecian or Roman art. Could a Greek or Roman 
artist even conceive such a picture as the Beatrice and 
Dante of Ary Scheffer ? a love so intense, so unsen- 
sual, so perfect, so pure ? And the Nydia, whom our 
own Randolph Rogers has consigned to immortality, 
is not a heathen but christian conception. " Greater 
love hath no man than this, that he give his life for 
his friend." In this marble there is the very highest 
expression of this sentiment ; a prophecy not merely 
of self-sacrifice to the Glaucus, whom Nydia loves with 
all the love of woman, but also of sacrifice to lone, 
whom he loves, the very rival of the devoted victim. 



SCIENCE AND ART. 41 

Does all the poetry of antiquity mount to the con- 
ception of such a devotion as this ? Does all the art 
of antiquity excel its realization in the living marble ? 
In his beautiful romance of Zanoni, Bulwer repre- 
sents a sa^e who had won from nature the secret of 
immortal life upon earth, as apostrophizing the simple 
herbs which men unconsciously crushed beneath the 
tread of their feet, but in whose juices were concealed 
potential agencies which contain life and death, 
strength and paralysis, vigor and disease, wakefulness 
and sleep, hope and despair, madness and reason, tears 
and laughter. But it seems to me that the great magi- 
cian, the sculptor, has a vastly larger power than this. 
He breathes the breath of genius upon the dead marble, 
and it instinctively starts into perpetual life, in every 
possible form of action or repose, and beaming with 
every conceivable expression of passion or sentiment. 
And so with prophetic vision we can see the highest 
expression of the highest sentiment of the future 
perfected civilization going down to immortality 
with our own Nydia; with the gladiator forever dy- 
ing, yet never dead; with the perpetual agony of the 
Laocoon; with Niobe lamenting to all future genera- 
tions the slaughter of her children; and with Apollo, 
eternally triumphing with the majesty and beauty of a 
youthful god. — John W. Dwinelle. 

27. Ancient Architecture. — In the morning of 
time, and long before civilization had visited the world, 
before the races of men had emerged from their tribal 
relations, the sounds of the Masons' labor were heard. 



42 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

With such implements as the forest, the spoils of the 
chase and the quarry afforded, they performed their 
allotted tasks. Then began the earliest attempts at 
monumental architecture. They consisted of mounds 
of earth, solitary upright stones, tables of rock, and 
circles of the same material, often enclosing vast areas 
dotted with similar objects. These rude monuments, 
erected at a time and by peoples over, whose history 
rests the pall of everlasting silence, are found in every 
land. They stand on the plains and mountains of 
Europe, amid the deserts of the Orient, and in the 
shade of the primeval forests of America. They bear 
no design, and have no device or inscription to explain 
their origin or purpose. They are the weird and voice- 
less relics of a remote and unremembered past. We 
can only conjecture that they were intended to com- 
memorate some important event, and aid in transmit- 
ting the tradition of it to future generations. Long 
after the commencement of historic time such a custom 
prevailed, for we read in the holy writings that a leader 
of Israel placed a stone near the sanctuary where the 
Most High had spoken to his people, and said: " Be- 
hold this stone shall be a witness unto us, for it hath 
heard all the words of the Lord." At last the creative 
genius of a mortal, whose name or birth-place is un- 
known, conferred on his race a blessing like to that of 
the fabled Prometheus when he brought to earth a 
spark from the celestial fires. With an inspiration 
almost divine he discovered a mode of transmuting the 
dull ores of earth into lustrous metals, and fashioned 
them into the manifold tools and implements of labor. 



SCIENCE AND ART. 43 

The light that shone from the first forge of the pre- 
historic age was the grandest illumination this world 
has ever witnessed. We can imaorine that the bricrht- 
eyed spirits of art, science, and of myriad industries 
beheld its rays from their starry home, and amid the 
heavenly symphonies of shining orbs winged their 
flight to a planet which now wooed their embraces. 
With the iron-age architecture assumed the exactness 
of a science while it retained all the graces of art. In 
the Valley of the Nile we find the earliest achieve- 
ments of architectural genius ; efforts which in grandeur 
and massiveness are unrivaled, and which may endure 
till Time shall be no more. In a narrow strip of inhabit- 
able land extending from the river to the rocks and 
deserts. Temples, Tombs, Pyramids and Obelisks rise 
in sublime vastness, the wonder and glory of the world, 
and the admiration of the aj^es. What mechanical 
agencies were employed in their construction, or what 
tools were used in tracing the inscriptions which are 
carved on their walls, are mysteries which the researches 
of science have failed to solve. The great pyramid of 
Ghizeh, far higher than any edifice which modern art 
has builded and dwarfing by comparison the most spa- 
cious cathedral of Europe, carries the imagination be- 
yond the period of authentic history into the twilight 
of tradition. When our continent was peopled by 
nations that have vanished like shadows from the earth; 
before the Israelites had escaped from thraldom and 
placed the oracles of God near the waters of Siloa; 
ages before civilization had dawned on the banks of 
the Tiber or the shores of Greece, this pyramid and 



44 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

•Other tombs and temples of the Nile had witnessed the 
silent march of the centuries as they sped onward to 
the eternity of the past. Hundreds of generations of 
men have toiled and passed away — empires have arisen, 
flourished and died — creeds, systems, and dynasties 
have disappeared, leaving no trace on the sands of 
time; mountains have been upheaved by volcanic fires 
of the globe, islands have emerged from the depths of 
ocean and sunk beneath its waves, flaming worlds have 
shone in the firmament and wandered from their orbits 
into night and chaos; and yet, amid all changes and 
revolutions, these monuments have stood in their 
imperishable and unchangeable majesty on the confines 
of the mighty desert. 

On reflection we can readily trace to their proper 
cause the peculiar characteristics of the works of Egyp- 
tian masonry. The vast and shadeless deserts, the 
Nile with its turbid waters flowing from mysterious and 
unexplored sources to the sea, the sea itself — all sur- 
rounding, unfathomable and unknown — -were types of 
the illimitable and eternal Egyptian architecture that 
received from the influence of such scenes, form and 
expression. It was an inevitable result. Hence arose 
the structures w^hose massive strength and gloomy vast- 
ness have defied the power of man and the elements 
to mar or destroy. 

At a much later period, and in the Isles of Greece 
we behold architectural efforts, in style and design as 
divergent from the sombre monuments in the Valley of 
the Nile as" the versatile genius of the Greek differed 
from the gloomy mind of the oriental builder. The 



SCIENCE AND ART. 4^ 

happy temperament and brilliant fancy of the former 
revelled in the adoration of the beautiful. He delighted 
in every form of art and every manifestation of nature 
that pleased the senses or charmed the imagination. He 
peopled the rivers, groves, and mountains of his native 
land with beings of more than mortal loveliness. He 
heard the glad voices of his joyous deities in the rush 
of the waves, the rustle of the leaves, the murmur of 
the winds, the music of the waterfall, and embodied his 
poetic conceptions in sculpture, architecture, and verse 
that lives when the works of his plastic hand are in 
mouldering ruin. The Grecian temples in their free- 
dom, lightness, grace and variety, reflected alike the 
ideal character of the religion of the time, and the 
intellect of the people. The glory of Greece has 
departed. The same sun that gilded the gardens of 
Attica, and the plains of Marathon, shines now on the 
ruined walls and desecrated shrines of her temples. 
Land of philosophy, song, poesy and eloquence, whose 
immortal spirit illumes and instructs a world, how art 
thou fallen, and yet how lovely in thy desolation ! 
Roman, Goth, Moslem and Frank have ravaged thy 
fields and robbed thee of thy treasures of art, but 
happily none can tear from thy brow the amaranthine 
wreath of fame, or pale the glorious memories of the. 
past. 

" No earth of tbine is lost in common mould. 
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around, 
And all the muses' tales seem truly told." 

Rome, in the style of her temples, imitated, with very 
slight differences, Grecian architecture. Her architects 



-1() CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

essayed at one time to improve on the beautiful origi- 
nal, and gave to the world the Tuscan and Composite 
orders. Vain attempt to rival in marble the maofnifi- 
■cent conceptions of Greece ! The Doric, Ionic and 
Corinthian pillars, with their graceful shafts, capitals 
and exquisite mouldings, upheld and adorned the tem- 
ples of gods throughout the empire. To Rome, how- 
ever, the civilized world is indebted for the introduction 
of the Arch. The Greeks and the Egyptians were 
either neglectful or ignorant of its uses and principle. 
The Romans employed it not only to embellish and 
improve their cities, but carried it into distant provinces, 
and by its aid constructed bridges across wide and 
rapid streams for the passage of their victorious legions. 
In their forums with splendid architectural porticos, in 
their theatres and amphitheatres which could seat 
armies, in their mighty aqueducts through which the 
waters of rivers were conducted to their cities, the 
genius of the Roman people asserted its superiority, 
and left models for the nations of the present day to 
admire and imitate. 

With the fall of the Roman Empire in the west there 
arose another order of architecture. It indicated a 
new era in the world's history. In the fourth and fifth 
centuries the Goths and other races poured from their 
northern homes upon the doomed provinces of Rome. 
No human power availed against their resistless march. 
From the shores of the German ocean their camp-fires 
extended to the walls of the Imperial City. Among 
these warlike nations what is known as the Order of 
Gothic Architecture had its orimn. It was introduced 



SCIENCE AND ART. 47 

by them into the north of Italy in the fourth century, 
and remained unchanged until the Crusaders at a later 
period engrafted upon it the designs of buildings which 
they had viewed with delight in the Mohammedan and 
Saracenic lands of the East. In the tall spires, pointed 
arches and delicate traceries of the Gothic architecture, 
we see the influence of fancies that had been moulded 
by the lights and shadows of the forest — by the over- 
arching- branches of the o-rand old trees, the caves with 
their sparry columns, and by the mountains with their 
dark cforsfes and beetlinof crag's. 

The Greeks dedicated their temples to the protect- 
ing deities of a city or state and displayed in their 
adornment a poetic character and speculative tendency. 
The Gothic races on the contrary designed their reli- 
gious edifices for the worship of a personal, ever-present 
God by the individual man. This idea predominates 
in the plan of every cathedral of the medieval ages, 
and is perhaps to-day the distinguishing trait which 
renders the Gothic architecture for devotional purposes 
more suitable than any model from antiquity. — Frank 
Tilford. 




->^^^p^v 



II. 

LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 



PART II. 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 



28. Education Aims to Perfect Man's Na- 
ture. — Education includes all the influences that are, 
or can be, brought to bear upon the individual, to form 
his constitution, actions, thoughts, and feelings ; soil, 
climate, parentage, laws, manners, customs, home, so- 
ciety, literature, and whatever else helps to build up the 
man into the perfection of his nature, or hinders the 
attainment of that perfection. — Rev. Horatio Stcbbins. 

29. A Riddle.— A science in itself, it is the parent 
of all sciences, and though most studied, yet least 
understood. In what form, and by what agencies, and 
under what control, it ought to be administered, is a 
still unsettled problem. Constituting a state question 
of vital interest to all the foremost nations, it has only 
led into conflicting and distractive theories, while the 
enigma it presents still waits solution. No CEdipus can 
read the riddle of this modern sphinx. — Joseph W. 
Winans. 

30. But One of Several Elements. — The neces- 
sity for the education of all the people must be con- 



50 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

ceded, but the power of education is often over-esti- 
mated by our writers. It is but one of several patent 
elements, all of which are necessary to liberty and 
security. The capacity to know, and the will to per- 
form, are two very different things. Education will 
create the first, but cannot always confer the second. 
The history of mankind would seem to sustain this 
statement. — Petei" H. Burnett. 



31. The Professional Teacher. — I have the 
highest respect for a teacher who devotes his life to teach- 
ing as a profession. Educated at great expense, always 
studying to keep up with all discoveries in science and 
advances in literature, he debars himself from all oppor- 
tunities for fortune that may disclose themselves in the 
avenues for wealth in the profitable world, that he may 
be poorly paid and have the consolation of knowing 
that some portion of mankind has made progress, and 
that the world will be the better because he has lived 
in it. Without men and women who will make this 
sacrifice, society would soon revert to its original bar- 
barous condition. Civilization is a perpetual struggle. 
After two thousand years of Christian teaching we can 
see daily that the cloak of civilization is but a thin 
garment, easily discarded and scantily covering the 
original savage. The teacher, clergyman, and the 
Christian missionary should be the most honored by 
society. They accept small pay and make lifelong 
sacrifices that the race may advance in knowledge and 
virtue. — B. B. Redding. 



literature and education. 51 

32. The Necessity for Competent Teachers. — 
To bring a school of one or two hundred boys and girls, 
quick living minds, bright possibilities, into contact, day 
after day, with a sluggish, stupid, empty mind, the 
refuse of some college class, rejected with disdain by 
one of the other professions, is something worse than 
absurd and ridiculous ; it is no less an atrocity than 
that Mezentian punishment committed by the terrible 
ingenuity of Heathenism, when "it tied the healthy 
man to the loathsome corpse, and left the living and 
the dead to corrupt together." No, my friends, if there 
be any place under the sun from which stupid men and 
women should be inexorably banished, more than from 
any other, it is the teacher's desk. Better, by far, that 
they be set to work to make clumsy chairs and leaky 
boots and shoes, than to mar and ruin God's marvellous 
handiwork in a boy or girl. For the sake of the rising 
generation, for the sake of future developments in 
science and art, for the honor of the country, for a 
credit to ourselves, for the sake of the world, give to 
your schools nothing but a high and suitable order of 
mind. — Rev. F, C. Ewer. 

33. Education as a Moral Force. — Education 
is not exclusively a literary, scientific, and aesthetic 
power, but it is besides, a potent moral force. It ren- 
ders him who, by his birth, was but an agency of evil, 
by his intelligence an instrument of good. Although 
there may be instances where the vices of humanity 
have been expanded into greater vigor, and rendered 
more destructive by the aid of knowledge, yet these 



52 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

are but exceptional. It is a sarcasm, rather than an 
argument, which urges that the innate evil is only 
intensified by education into educated evil, and thus 
rendered more capable of mischief; for the very dis- 
cipline of mental culture, the habitudes it forms, the 
ideas it creates, the lessons it imparts, whether from 
nature, by scientific exploration, or from literature by 
the lofty sentiments of the poets, philosophers, his- 
torians and moralists of every age — all tend to stimu- 
late the moral sense. Thus grappling with man's 
mental, intellectual, and moral nature, education brings 
them from their lethargy into complete development. 
It is the fulcrum Archimedes needed to accomplish the 
Kosmon Kineso. It is the philosopher's stone which 
transmutes man's baser metal into gold. It is the 
chisel of Thorwalsden which forces out from the rough 
marble block a sculptured form of symmetry and 
beauty. The ugly duck, in the pathetic Apologue of 
Andersen, though persecuted by the flock, was a true 
swan from the beginning, and only grew from its 
original deformity into the natural comeliness of all its 
tribe. In seeming, merely, did it constitute the meaner 
bird. But education is not limited unto development. 
It recreates that which it beautifies. It turns the ugly 
duck into a swan, by an absolute reversal of its nature. 
— Joseph W. PVznans. 

34. Intellectual Honesty. — What do we mean 
by intellectual development and the emancipation, or 
freedom of thoug-ht? There is reason to believe that 
there is a good deal of vague idea and loose talk, and 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 53 

perhaps some cant about these things. It is quite 
natural that there should be. New ideas are, to some 
minds, a little too bracing at first, and bring on the ex- 
hilaration of surprise, and a man is excited at finding 
the lost key of the universe. I met such an one the 
other day. He had got everything, but a nutshell to 
put it in. But let us forgive something to that pleas- 
ant confidence that in a moment of undue familiarity 
would lift the veil from the face of nature. The cant 
that is sometimes heard is not altogether discreditable, 
for cant is almost always about that which is good, and 
only indicates a lack of intellectual and moral fibre. 

By intellectual development, we do not surely mean 
that any new faculty has been added to the mind ; 
neither do we mean that any accession has been made 
to the fundamental and essential principles ot human 
nature. By intellectual development, I understand 
the gradual growth of improved methods of the mind in 
its inquiries after the truth of things and events in the 
material and i7i the httman world. It is a better logic, 
it is a better observation of facts, a finer perception of 
analogies, a more subtle detection of difference, a long- 
minded staying power of generalization, and a firmer 
grasp of the law of cause and efifect. The illustration 
of this is found in the fact that the reasons that satisfied 
the mind of an early age do not satisfy the mind of a 
later age, even when those reasons come to the same 
result. Socrates, in the Phcedo, draws persuasions for 
a belief in immortality, from the succession of day and 
night. That would hardly satisfy the mind of to-day ; 
the truth requires a better method in the mind. Intel- 



54 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

lectual development has been attended by a recon- 
struction of the methods on which science depends, and 
Bacon, on the empirical side, and Descartes, on the in- 
tellectual side, are its great historic exponents. It is 
no spread-eagle glory, but a patient, subtle process of 
intellectual power. There are laws of thought: and 
reasoned truth, that knows no fortuitous luck, and no 
blind gropings of chance or passion, is the only worthy 
achievement of the mind. Intellectual development 
is not merely an individual endowment, but a common- 
sense of truth and right reason in the common mind. 
It is the increase of the idea of order, law, cause, and 
consequence in the mind of an age. 

Freedom of thought has no existence, except when 
based on intellectual development, such as this. On any 
other grounds, free thought is in the intellectual world 
what free love is in the sensual world. Without this 
recitude of the intellect, thinking itself is a vagary, and 
truth is a caprice of self-will. To be intellectually 
honest, is the last accomplishment of a mind that moves 
without passion or prejudice in the happy rhythm of 
truth, simply seeking to know what is. Intellectual 
honesty is much more rare than moral honesty. — Rev. 
Horatio Stcbbins. 

35. The Pursuit of Knowledge. — The pursuit 
of knowledge may be likened to the ascent of a moun- 
tain. With slow and painful steps we climb its rugged 
side. Thorns and brambles block the way and lacerate 
the flesh. Through the rank undergrowth no vista is 
disclosed, no prospect opens. Dense thickets close 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 55 

each avenue of sight. From the thick atmosphere 
there comes a sense of stifling to the panting breast. 
Repeated pauses are enforced, to obviate exhaustion. 
As we mount higher, casual gleams appear of the 
expanding landscape far below, then flit away. New 
difficulties thwart our progress while we rise, until the 
jaded spirit seems about to faint. But when the sum- 
mit is attained, how utterly all consciousness of past 
endurance sinks beneath the Qrorp;eous vision which 
there bursts upon our gaze : "All is forgot in that 
blithe jubilee." So it is with the course of learning. 
Constrained into a hateful discipline, the mind shrinks 
from that dry detail of rules and problems, lines and 
angles, rudiments and grammars, which, from the out- 
set, guides the student on his upward path. They seem 
to him a miscellaneous array of things incongruous, 
without vitality or application, to be forced into memory 
by long and painful effort, for no seeming good. To 
them there is no landscape, no vistaed revelation of 
utility or beauty, — nothing but a close, stifling mental 
atmosphere that chokes the spirit. Yet when the stu- 
dent's life mounts higher up ; when these abstractions 
merge in bright and living truths ; when physics ulti- 
mate in those experimental facts which throw new light 
on science; when grammar opens up the rich resources 
of the Greek and Latin tongues, with all the modern 
classics — throwing open to the scholar's reach the grand 
ideas born in everv ac:e, the burninof thoughts and 
glowing words of sophists, statesmen, orators and poets ; 
when mathematics guide him to an undiscovered star; 
then is the mountain summit scaled, and knowledge 



56 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

vindicates its power in the insufferable glory there 
revealed. — Joseph W. Winans. 

36. The Evolution of Mind. — Genius alone, 
unaided by education, can have but a feeble flight. 
Innate intellect may exalt a self-taught poet; but can- 
not alone constitute an astronomer. The diamond in 
the rough may pass forever unheeded, but not until the 
friction of the wheel of labor and study shall have eli- 
cited its latent fire, will its polish reflect its merit. 

The development of education should follow the 
evolution of mind. The course of education is the 
mirror of nature, and should be achromatic in its re- 
flections of light. The direction of its instruction 
should be predicated upon the growth of the organic 
intellect. 

The first feeble glimmerings of brain-work in the 
infant, in its instincts to get nutrition, are progressively 
fostered by the mother until it learns to feed alone; the 
first rays of mind which kindle curiosity in the child 
are brightened by showing it noisy and glittering ob- 
jects ; the parent-puzzling boy, with his "whys" and 
" wherefores," is satisfied with lettered blocks, pictures 
and puzzles, until, with growing brain and expanding 
intelligence, he explores with his eyes the natural world 
around him, and finally, in manhood, seeks in books 
aid from his predecessors, aspiring to grasp in his com- 
prehension all the forces in illimitable space. These, 
then, are the natural epochs in life's education, and 
such the course to pursue in man's tuition. The edu- 
cation of the past has shot wide of this mark. How 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 57 

vain would be its recapitulation. Search the historic 
schools of philosophy. Logk at the inflictions of re- 
ligious and political powers. 

But ''the Now" is another era. The Present, in be- 
half of the Future, speaks with a loftier voice. With 
''Truth" inscribed upon her banner, and " Freedom" em- 
blazoned on her escutcheon. Science calmly but surely 
advances, without arrogance, yet, with a step in her 
march, accelerated beyond what has ever heretofore 
been known. Doubtless it was this progress in learn- 
ing, this aspiration for freedom of thought, this expan- 
sive spirit of Science, which gave origin and impetus to 
the grand fusion of the divided German States into the 
great unified German Empire ; for Germany, however 
it may be a people's Empire, in Science, is Learning's 
Republic— Z>r. A. B. Stotit. 

37. The Pen. — Ah, thou little implement, how 
much of undeserved reputation hast thou blazoned ! 
How many noble thoughts depicted! Hovr many phi- 
losophical reflections embodied! The tomes of history 
are thy biography ! Without thee tradition perishes. 
The troubadors who despised thee are extinct, and 
their improvised sonnets forgotten. With thy aid, the 
epics and heroics of the dead poets still survive to 
crown their names with immortality! "The pen," said 
the dramatist, "is mightier than the sword;" and the 
dramatist has said truly. It is the architect of mind 
that molds its language into form, and frescoes it with 
the word-limning of the scholar. It rescues, preserves, 
transmits, and fixes its subject like the granite base, for 



58 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

the building- of a structure of fame! It stimulates the 
prosperity of states, and secures the triumph of diplo- 
macy. Heroes depend upon it for their ovations. To 
literature it is the oralleon, with flowins^ sails — frei^rhted 
with intellectual treasures. The down-hearted take cour- 
a.£re from the fearlessness of its strictures, and tyrants 
tremble at its power. This is thy eulogy, my companion^ 
and my friend. Plucked though thou be from an igno- 
ble wing, the Damacus steel can make no deeper or 
surer incision. The sword has no such panegyric. The 
phrase, "It destroys," is at once its history and its 
epitaph — and for the record of even this brief sentence, 
it is indebted to thee. Yes, thou art much greater than 
the sword; and so let the thesis and the antithesis of 
thy measurement go together. — Williafn Bausinaji. 

38. Physical and Mental Pleasures. — The 
purely animal pleasures are adapted, evidently, by their 
narrowness of range, to this little span of life — hardly 
is there variety enough in them to go around the three- 
score-years-and-ten. Who, as he has sat down to his 
table, has not felt how monotonous and drear a life of 
a thousand years would be, with the same dull round 
of beef, pork, mutton or venison ? Who has not sym- 
pathized with me, when, long suffering man that I am, 
my temper gave way at the seventh reception of the 
saddle of lamb in the same week ? " Madame," I ex- 
claimed, "it seems to me that since our bridal we have 
had nothing but saddle ; if this goes on, I shall be like 
the horse that Motherwell's pathetic verse has immortal- 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 59 

ized. He went forth in the morning, and in the even- 
ing, 

" Home came the saddle, 
But lie nevermore." 

Who has not congratulated himself on his mortality, 
as he has taken up his cup, filled with the perpetual 
water, with its slight modification of wine, spirits, tea 
and coffee, and the more palatable of these, prohibited 
by that stern old moralist, the gout, who stands like a 
country schoolmaster, ready to mark the slightest devi- 
ation from soberness, with his inevitable chalk? Yet, 
from this limited variety, Heliogabalus must sup, and 
Lucullus dine; and the culinary genius of a Vatel, who 
kills himself because a soup is too little seasoned, must 
compose the dishes by which the sated palate of a Louis 
Fifteenth is stimulated. 

But for the mind — for the intellect — for the investi- 
gation of truth — here, variety is boundless. Here, de- 
sire finds ever new changing food to gratify it. Here^ 
as bodily faculties fail, and physical pleasures pall, the 
pleasures of the mind constantly increase in variety 
and intensity. In the gratification of these desires, we 
find our minds created for no finite bound of time, but 
everything is graduated on an eternal scale. — John B, 
Feltoii. 

39. The Republic of Letters. — The world had 
better lose all other arts combined than to forfjet its A B 
Cs. Sometimes I have thought of them as of twenty-six 
soldiers that set out to conquer the world — that A was 
an archer, and B was a bugler, and C was a corporal, 



60 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and D was a drummer, and E was an ensign, and F 
was a fifer, and G was a gunner, down to Z, who was 
a zouave ; and these twenty-six drill-sergeants have 
subdued the kingdoms of the earth and air, taken pos- 
session of the realms of thought, and founded a repub- 
lic of which the wise and noble of all time are citizens 
and contemporaries, where their is neither death nor 
forgetfulness — the imperial Republic of Letters. 

Again I have thought of them as of a telegraphic 
cable, laid beneath the waters of time, safe from dis- 
turbing storm and tempest — so short, the child's primer 
will contain it ; so long, it connects the remotest ages 
with the present, and will stretch to the last syllable of 
recorded time. — Newton Booth. 

40. Style. — No two styles are alike. They all 
differ, and must differ, because souls differ. Style is to 
the matter as atmosphere is to the landscape. Hang 
a New Hamj:fehire air over Florence, and is it Florence 
still? Strip the style of De Ouincey of its matter, and 
it is like taking the sound out of a grove of pines. 
No one has yet sounded this mystery of a style — how 
it is that an item penned by one man is common-place, 
and the same fact stated by another is a rifle-shot or a 
revelation; how words locked up in a form can contrive 
to tip a wink ; how a paragraph may drip with the 
honey of love ; how a phrase may be full of infinite 
suggestion; how a page may be as gorgeous as a tropi- 
cal landscape, or as cool as a December day in New 
England. The style is the man. There are elements 
in Hawthorne very repulsive, yet there is something 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 61 

infinitely attractive in his purest artistic English, of a 
higher order than Irving's. Whittier's style is like a 
trumpet sounding through his Quaker soul. There is 
an advancing melody in all of Longfellov/s handiwork, 
from the sweet sixteen air of his " Songs of Life," to 
the chapters of " Hiawatha," and his latest poem. — 
Thomas Starr King. 



THE PRESS. 

41. Observe how the outer bark of the madrono 
and eucalyptus, with the coming of every summer, 
bursts, rolls up and falls to the ground, as so much rub- 
bish. That is a sign of expanding life. A great deal 
of newspaper rubbish to-day is a sign of growth. The 
outer rind and bark of things fall to the ground by that 
vital force which is continually developing a larger and 
nobler life in the community. No man will hereafter 
go to the head of this profession without fair scholar- 
ship, a wide range of observation, a large capacity to 
deal in a general way with human affairs, and that keen 
insight which catches the spirit and essence of this on- 
going life. Most difficult of all is a certain power of 
statement, which no school can teach, and without which 
the highest plane of the journalist cannot be reached. 
Your long story will not be heard. The world is wait- 
ing for the man of condensation. Tell it in few words. 
If you can master this eclecticism of thought and state- 
ment, I know of no more promising field for a young 
man to-day than that of journalism; if one cannot, the 
potato-field, in a season of blight, is quite as promising. 



62 • CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

The newspaper has been gradually encroaching on 
the domain of literature. It has absorbed monthly maga- 
zines, or forced publishers to resort to illustrations — 
to a sort of picture-book literature for grown-up child- 
ren. It has driven the lumbering quarterlies into 
smaller fields, and diminished their relative importance. 
The average citizen craves the news from a journal 
having the very dew of the morning and of the even- 
ing upon it. It must come to him damp and limp, 
bringing whatever is best at the smallest possible cost. 
The newspaper is the herald of the new era. Its 
errand must be swift, its statements compact, and its 
thought eclectic and comprehensive. 

Three thousand years ago, one of the grand old 
prophets spoke mysteriously of the "living spirit of the 
wheels." Was it other than the modern newspaper 
thrown off by the pulsing of the great cylinder press ? 
But observe, that through yonder Golden Gate, which 
the sun and the stars and the lamps of men glorify day 
and night, the devil-fish comes sailing up, and is not 
concerned whether his accursed tentacula close around 
saint or sinner. Is not that the fullest symbol of a 
public journal conducted by ignorant and unscrupulous 
men ? Rather would you not choose, as a more fitting 
symbol of the Ideal journal, one of the small globules 
of quicksilver, which you shall find on any of these en- 
circling hills, s'o powerless to draw to it an atom of 
filth or rubbish, but ever attracting the smallest particle 
of incorruptible silver and gold ? — W. C. Bartlett. 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION.- 63 

42. The liberty of the press is the highest safe- 
guard to all free government. Ours could not exist 
without it. It is with us, nay, with all men, like a great, 
exulting, and abounding river. It is fed by the dews 
of heaven, which distil their sweetest drops to form it. 
It gushes from the rill, as it breaks from the deep 
caverns of the earth. It is fed by a thousand affluents 
that dash from the mountain top to separate again into 
a thousand bounteous and irrigating rills around. On 
its broad bosom it bears a thousand barks. There 
genius spreads its purpling sail. There poetry dips its 
silver oar. There art, invention, discovery, science, 
morality, religion, may safely and securely float. It 
wanders through every land. It is a genial, cordial 
source of thought and inspiration wherever it touches, 
whatever it surrounds. Upon its borders there grows 
every flower of grace and every fruit of truth. I do 
not deny that that river sometimes oversteps its bounds. 
I do not deny that that river sometimes becomes a 
dangerous torrent, and destroys towns and cities upon 
its banks; but I say that without it, civilization, human- 
ity, government, all that makes society itself, would dis- 
appear, and the world would return to its ancient bar- 
barism. If that were to be possible, or thought possi- 
ble for a moment, the fine conception of the great poet 
would be realized. Civilization itself would roll the 
wheel of its car backward for two thousand years. If 
that were so, it would be true that 

" As one by one, in dread Medea's train, 
Star after star fades off th' etherial train, 



64 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Thus at her fell approach and secret might, 
Art after art goes out, and all is night. 
Philosophy, that leaned on heaven before. 
Sinks to her second cause, and is no more. 
Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, 
And, unawares, morality expires." 

— Ge7i. E. D. Baker. 



43. A free press is the great economic illuminator 
of politics, art, religion, society, morals. It is at once 
the tribunal of taste and the articulator of thought It 
is the handmaid of enterprise, the fortress of order, 
the mailed, invincible right arm of freedom. Like 
commerce, it gives health and vigor to the life of 
nations; like commerce, its sceptre stretches from the 
shining temples of the Orient to the swimming forests 
of the Thames. Its shrouds stiffen and its white sheets 
fill with the winged gales of progress. Beating foam- 
ing paths through conquered waters; dashing on steeds 
of fire along iron ways; harnessing the elements to its 
chariot; reading the mysteries of the magnet; making 
a courier of the lightning, and guides of the sun and 
stars, it courses its way in majesty, in power and in 
glory, over a boundless sea of possibilities, and its do- 
minion broadens with every swell of the tide. Its 
many-colored fabric is meshed and fashioned in the be- 
neficent loom of cumulative emprise, and its shifting 
shuttle marks the pace of the world's advance. 

— Thomas FitcJi^ 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 65 

BOOKS. 

44. The distance of a star, the age of a planet, the 
flow of history, the stories of biography, the vast spaces 
of fiction, the richest music — such knowledge and such 
society may be ours through only a hundred books, with 
a cultivated taste; such an altar may be erected in our 
memories, and such stately worshipers may face it as 
Mrs. Browning describes in lier "Vision of the Poets." 
The title to such a treasure is a taste for literature — 
reading with rigid selection and exclusion — reading for 
an end. — Thomas Stari' King. 



46. There are books of fact, books of life, and books 
of art. The first include the sciences; the second em- 
brace history, biography, and all the inquiries into the 
substance of truth, as regards man's proper conduct and 
destiny ; the third comprehend verse and prose, not 
discussing abstract truth, but poetry, the drama, and the 
w^rld of fiction. A very few books of the first class 
suffice to start us. But it is a shame that we know so 
little of what constitute the glory and shadow of the 
world we live in — geology, which opens the cellar 
department, and astronomy, which interprets the dome 
of our habitation. The leisure evenino-s of a sinsfle 
winter, devoted to the Connections of Mrs. Somerville, 
to Ly ell's geology, Mitchell's stump speech concerning 
astronomy, Nicoll, Buckland and Gardner would so 
stretch the mind that one could not go to business in the 

morning, nor look out at night a moment at the sky, 
5 



66 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

without feeling what grand preparation had been made 
for his Hving. A traveler assures us that in a certain part 
of Liberia the people can see the satellites of Jupiter. 
The great heads of the Celestial chapters that hint the 
immensity of the Zodiac should always be in memory's 
si^ht: and half a dozen fascinatin(:j- books tell it all — 
books to be read not as water is poured out on the sand, 
but as it is fed to the roots of a tree. The deepest 
facts of thirty centuries may all be sounded in the 
leisure of a winter, so, at least, that a twilight intelli- 
ligence concerning them shall illuminate the memory. 
The distance of a star, the age of a planet, the flow of 
history, the stores of biography, the vast spaces of fic- 
tion, the richest music, — such knowledo'e and such 
society may be ours through only a hundred books. — 
Thomas Star?'- King. 



46. All healthy souls love the society of trees; and 
the mold which feeds them is a better fertilizer of 
thought than the mold of many books. You see the 
marks of fires which liave swept along these mountain 
sides; here and there the trunk of a redwood has been 
streaked by a tongue of flame, but the tree wears its 
crown of eternal green. It is only the dry sticks and 
rubbish which are burned up, to make more room for 
the giants, while many noxious reptiles have been driven 
back to their holes. Possibly the wood-ticks number 
some millions less, but very little that is worth saving 
is consumed. 

We shall need a regenerating fire some day, to do 
for books what is done for forests. May it be a hot 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 67 

one when it comes. Let no dry sticks nor vermin 
escape. Ninety in every hundred books which have 
got into our hbraries within the last half century will 
fail to enlighten the world until there is one good, 
honest conflagration. Something might be gained 
from the ashes of these barren books; therefore, pile on 
the rubbish, and use the poker freely. Let not the fire 
go out until some cords of doggerel, concocted in the 
name of poetry, have been added thereto. The giants 
will survive the flames; but punk-wood, moths, and 
wood-ticks will all be gone. — W. C. Bartlett. 



47. Guard against desultory reading. Yellow- 
backed literature, poorly-edited newspapers, and bad 
books, are the curse of this age. A pyramid of such trash 
is only fit to be burned for a light to read a good author 
by. Read but few books, and learn them well, and 
affectionate caressing will take the place of formal 
visits. We have too many books ; some of them are 
a curse to the student, and contemptible to the critic. 
Select a few of the best writers of ancient and modern 
times, and read them well, and your mind will be the 
best disciplined. Under the wear and tear of life, men 
usually forget much that they have read, because their 
memories are confused by irregular exercises; while on 
the other hand, organized and disciplined memories 
cling tenaciously to their stock of knowledge. When 
old age begins to assail the mind, legions of acquire- 
ments stretch themselves along the battlements of 
memory, and dispute every inch of its advance; and 
if there is a moment in man's eventful life when he is 



68 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

grand, it is when the treasures of the mind are seen 
resisting, with unrelenting vigor, the encroachments of 
decay, as the pulses cease in the dead body. It is told 
of Rumford that he proposed a scheme to the Elector 
of Bavaria, by which he might economize in feeding his 
soldiers. His plan was small rations, and thorough 
mastication, holding that a crumb, well masticated, was 
better than a pone untoothed; so, a page, digested, is 
better than a book devoured. — Rev. T. H. B. Anderson, 



48. There are friendships, regal and rare, be- 
gotten of communion with authors. Books smile, 
salute and fraternize; they are courteous, urbane, affable, 
friendly or fascinating, as the case may be. Their com- 
panionship is no myth or figure of speech. Their 
friendships have emancipated many a soul from the 
thraldom of chill and bitter loneliness. So viewed, 
how sacred is the mission of every printed page! Shall 
it carry health and healing, courage and sustenance, 
light and melody, hope and aspiration, or shall fever, or 
apathy and gloom distil and drop from its noxious 
sentiments and fancies ? Happy they who, with voice 
or pen, lubricate the jarring wheels of life by kindly 
interchange of generous word or helpful message ! 
Who, casting aside, with generous gesture, all selfish 
considerations, awaken by the concords of their own 
nature, music in the hearts of others, until even the 
prodigal in his exile shall catch the far-off melody of 
the home song, and turn repentant footsteps thither. 

— Sarah B. Cooper. 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 69 

-49. Literature may not create character, but it may 
influence it. Genius, a gift often connected with erratic 
fire, is ever hungry for intellectual food; but because it 
has in some cases floated down to depravity, is no ar- 
gument against indulging the mental appetite. Libraries 
open up to us the delicate organization of the brain, the 
wonderful formation of the eye, and their perfect con- 
nection, the strange meaning of the hand, the scratches 
upon the rocks, the marvellous beauties of the flower, 
the mysteries of the ocean, the land, the clouds, the 
air, and the starry wonders of the heavens. — Thomas 
Starr King. 

BO. The supreme privilege and advantage that so- 
ciety to-day enjoys over society five hundred years ago, 
is privilege of reading printed literature. Our educa- 
tion is conducted now by the first masters. At college 
we may have had third-rate professors, but for a dollar or 
two we have at our homes for professors, Faraday to 
teach us chemistry, Goodrich to instruct us in Greek, 
Owen to read us anatomy, Schlegel to explain the phil- 
osophy of literature, and Macaulay and Guizot to read 
lectures on the laws and heroes of the last eighteen 
hundred years. Books are our university, spirits are 
our teachers. All other helps to our cultivation are 
feeble in comparison. To hundreds of thousands of 
people the sky contains less of celestial phenomena than 
an ordinary treatise on astronomy. Thousands of men 
might skirt and tramp the whole region of the Alps and 
Andes, with eyes open too, and still know less of moun- 
tains than one learns on quietly reading the fourth vol- 



70 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

ume of Ruskln's " Modern Painters." Though they 
roamed with the Wandering Jew, and heard him by the 
month detail the course of human events, they would 
know, when the last session ended, less than on reading 
Montesqueu's " Compend of Laws." The evenings of 
a single week in reading Agassiz' " Essay on Classifica- 
tion," would discover, to a man of average brain, 
more knowledge of natural history than if, two by two, 
all the animals of the globe were to parade before him, 
and when that pageantry had vanished, he were led into 
a museum where every species of the myriads that 
compose the crust of the globe were labelled and dis- 
played. 

Plato disparaged books in comparison with conver- 
sation. They, said he, stand like paintings — in just one 
form and attitude — and to all questioning return one and 
the self-same answer. Now, it is by the grace of print- 
ing that we know this saying of Plato. True, to know 
a rna^i is greater than to know the greatest book, yet 
no talk with Milton would have evoked a "Paradise 
Lost," or a "Comus" from his lips. Had you called 
on Newton, you might possibly have heard him fret — 
surely you would have heard him talk no chapter of 
queries as to Optics. If you had called on Shake- 
speare, he might have treated you to as much sack as 
you could stagger under, but in the interview he would 
not take you up to the region of his " Cassio " and 
" Imogene," or down into the depths of his feelings. 
Call on Thackery at London, and he might entertain 
you with his grievances at the hands of the member of 
his club who sketched his broken nose rather too dis- 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 71 

tinctly, but he would not sketch you a Major Pen- 
deiinis. Dickens, on your call, would be too busy with 
domestic troubles to' unveil that tropical sea of fancy, 
out of which the Agnes of "David Copperfield" sprung, 
like a new Aphrodite, from the foam. It would be 
pleasant to see truly reported an hour's free conversa- 
tion with Thomas DeOuincey, but for six bits, one may 
purchase his "Suspiria de Profundis," and sink into the 
music of the prose, the most rich and masterly since 
Hooker. You often may have thought what a privi- 
lege it had been to live in the time of Jesus; to hear 
the sermon on the Mount fall from his lips, to be pres- 
ent when he unsealed the eyes of Bartimeus, to be on 
the mount of transfiguration with him. 

Have you considered that by virtue of two hundred 
duodecimo pages, we all know more of him than any 
dweller in Canaan, any Gallilean, any citizen of Jeru- 
salem could have known ? Did they who saw but 
fragments of his life, see more than we, whose scope 
embraces all of it, from the birth in Bethlehem to the 
ascent from Olives,'* Was the privilege of the woman of 
Samaria, who heard him but briefly, and misunderstood 
most of what she heard, greater, or was your privilege 
greater — you who hear what he said at the well, who 
stand wjthin ear-shot of the talk with Nicodemus at 
night — who hear all the parables, the promises, and see 
him blessing little children ? Let every one who has a 
taste for books and music thank God that he was not 
born earlier. Books and music ! Books are music. 
What was knoivmg Beethoven compared with hearing 
the Andante of the Fifth Symphony ? 



72 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

If the organ should grow conscious, and could play 
of itself, what music would it chatter, beside the flood 
of harmonies that pour out from it at some vesper-time 
when the player to its keys hints the thoughts that 
some master has set down in books ! It is the chatter 
of eenius that we get from their conversation — the 
earnest, noble, stirring thoughts we find when we 
sit down alone to their books. 

Books constitute not an Empire, but a Republic of 
Letters. Every steam engine looks to me like a snort- 
ing democrat. "Take a good stare at me, I'm one of 
the b'hoys," he seems to say. He seeks to know north 
and south, the east and west. He chafes and frets to 
be running on an excursion past Great Salt Lake, mak- 
ing Brigham Young fain to stop his ears at the screech- 
ine, with the ereat U. S. Mail on board, and the old 
flag gleaming through the clouds that issue from the 
smoke-pipe, with no star lacking. Genius may be 
miserly, and hoard its wealth, but the steam cylinder 
press screams: "In any nook or corner of the land, is 
there a desirable thing, let me know, and you will get 
it cheap at your door to-morrow. It will give you pub- 
lic documents, fish out forgotten knowledge, rummage 
private correspondence, ransack creation." The man of 
genius may be iPxcan, and wall himself in from the 
world, but the palace of truth that he rears in his se- 
clusion is as free to the world as St. Peter's is to the 
poorest believer in Rome. The ticket of the Alphabet 
admits you and me. 

When we come to talk more practically about books, 
we see the necessity of selection. In the Imperial 



LITERATURE AND ' EDUCATION. 73 

Library at Paris (the largest in the world) there are 
eight hundred thousand volumes, and one hundred 
thousand MSS. ''Art is long, and time is fleeting." 
The reader who had beo^un in the reio"n of Kin[j David 
to read them, if stopped only on Sundays, to rest his eyes 
and cro to church, would be now about checking the 
the last volume. [Spoken a. d. i86i. Editor.] Set 
side by side single copies of all the books that have 
been printed, and they would reach from the vineyards 
of Los Angeles to the snowy beard of Mount Shasta. 
No man lives, no German professor, the juices of whose 
body are a decoction in equal parts of tobacco-juice 
and beer, can in all his life-time read through half the 
volumes of our San Francisco Mercantile Library. 
A hundred volumes might be selected which, if read 
with care, during their leisure hours, would make men 
of average brains better informed than are any, except 
those who are supereminent in knowledge — not the 
sort of specific knowledge which the great German 
grammarian in Latin craved, who, in his old age, re- 
marked that if he were to live life over again, he would 
devote himself entirely to the dative case. — Thomas 
Starr King. 

NOVELS. 

51. A nation's literature is an index to its civiliza- 
tion. The cultivation of the study of letters and a 
high standard of literary work are consequent upon the 
refinement of a people. But may not literature bear 
to its country some more important relation than that 



74 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of a result ? May it not be a great element of national 
erowth ? I believe that literature is more than a mere 
accompaniment of culture, that it is a prime factor in 
advancing culture, that it is a proximate cause of civili- 
zation, that it may be made a mighty motor in redeem- 
ing from sluggishness and immorality the populace 
when taught to read. 

For a clear understanding of the idea I desire to il- 
lustrate, consider civilization to mean the moral and 
social status of a people, and literature to be their learn- 
ing and their fancy preserved in writing. It is the part 
that the latter may take in- raising the moral and social 
condition of our country, that we arc to regard. The 
department of literature that is most popular, and, 
therefore, is most Influential for good or for ill, that 
most earnestly requires the watchfulness of those who 
admire purity of character among us, is the department 
devoted to fiction. Of the various writings of the fic- 
titious school, the novel may be most easily turned to 
civilizing humanity, or to pandering to its most de- 
graded tastes. The novel reflects the experiences, the 
aims, the heroism of mankind; it holds up for sympa- 
thy, emulation or contempt, acts and emotions. All the 
manifold springs of human conduct find a source in the 
novel. With the novel the power lies of spreading 
abroad a sense of honor and of creating respect for 
true dignity of manhood. It should be life reproduced, 
not a mere representation of the phases of existence, 
but an impressive guide to the grand purpose of living. 

Romances are more numerous and of a better order 
in Great Britain than in America. Some authors be- 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 75 

lieve that the supremacy of the English, in this respect, 
is due to their systematized h'fe. One writer, of observ- 
ant mind, has assigned as a reason, to which he at- 
tached much importance, that in England almost the 
only readers of this style of literature, are found among 
those who have little to do, the nobility and the wealthy 
classes ; that their leisure makes them exacting, and 
their exactions must be heeded to insure the author's 
success. If this fact has a tendency to perfect the 
novel, it is entirely independent of the subject matter, 
upon the treatment of which its lasting merit and 
power for usefulness must depend. 

The subject matter is the life portrayed. What are 
the distinctive marks of life in this republic, drawn by 
lapse of time ? The cardinal principle of a democracy 
is original equality. We all start equals. It is curious, 
but true, that we claim equality with those only who 
have risen above us. The endeavor to justify our pre- 
tentions, is one of the causes of the restlessness pecu- 
liar to us. I do not say that envy and jealousy actuate 
us in seeking to better ourselves. I prefer to think 
that it is the possibility of improvement made manifest 
by the achievements of others, that impels us onward. 
But whatever may be the inner motive, the outward 
fact still remains. Democratic life is essentially nerv- 
ous, active, a chapter of successes and reverses. It is 
with the details of this life our novelist must deal. Do 
they not present to him a more inviting prospect than 
the regulated order of an aristocratic existence ? 

Yet this is the life of which DeTocqueville has said 
that "nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so 



76 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

crowded with paltry interests, in a word, so anti-poetic." 
Anti-poetic let it be; earnestness, not poetry, is the es- 
sential of a novel. But petty, insipid, or crowded with 
paltry interests, never. Here the individual lives, here 
man stands an architect of fame, with his doubts, with 
his passions, in the presence of rare prosperities, or in- 
conceivable wretchedness. These things are real, they 
are to be the theme of the novelist's story. In them 
each one will find something to touch his sympathy, to 
make him quiver with hope and exultation, or bow in 
pity. 'Tis sympathy moulds the most of us, and es- 
pecially the lowly. To that the novelist's creations 
must appeal that we may be made to glow with the in- 
spiration of manly purpose and with the possibilities 
born of resolve. 

It may be asked why the novel has not made its ap- 
pearance ere now, if it is so well adapted to our system 
of livinof. In strugforlinGf to exist we have had no time 
to look about us and write; and during our literary in- 
fancy, the literature of a mother-tongue was in its 
prime. Moreover, a literature can not be built in a 
day. The true novel can be drawn only by one of 
keen observation and wide sympathies. I speak of sym- 
pathies, not alone towards one's fellow man, but towards 
one's fellow people. Until some national feeling has 
sprung from the formative existence of a, people, until 
national traits are developed, In which we all take pride, 
we can expect no one to possess that subtle kinship 
with men at large, requisite to the broad effective pur- 
pose of the democratic novel. 

Our country has been pushed to conclusive heights, 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 11 

from which she is gradually settling to that stable condi- 
tion of society from which alone prosperity can be evolv- 
ed. The trials of past years have brought us to realize 
that this is not a grand speculation, but that steady, honest 
exertion is the only precursor of success. The presence 
of schools in all quarters familiarizes the popular mind 
with letters. We have had the fancies of Poe, the 
natural beauties of Bryant and Longfellow, the sunny 
mysteries of Hawthorne, and the sturdy purity of Em- 
erson. The time has come in our literary and historic 
growth for the advent of the novelist. It is for those 
who feel an interest in perpetuating the romance of 
life and of meaning, to aid the author in his self-im- 
posed task of writing for the advancement of his race, 
not with the sole motive of enriching himself He is 
but an artist who introduces into his living pictures real- 
istic forms. The age is propitious to the growth of 
strong men and women, whom the writer must copy. 
The novel, true to the world it represents, must have 
much in common with humanity; to be true to itself, 
it must turn this common bond to the enobling of hu- 
manity. The quality of his models and the nature of 
their thoucrhts and utterances determine the value of 
the novelist's gift to his country. It is for the people 
to furnish him with the originals of those instructive 
lives which he is to present as an example to his read- 
ers. And especially is it the duty of those whose 
studies bring them in contact with the grandest charac- 
ters of reality and of fancy, by their private lives and 
public opinions, to aid in fostering a general spirit of 
rectitude, that the novelist may be filled with it, and 



78 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

that all may know it and feel its nearness when breathed 
upon from the pages of the opened volume. 

Then can the novel be made to elevate the moral 
and social status of a people. The companion of man's 
quiet hours, it will speak to him in his retirement, when 
he can commune with the thoughts its teachings may 
inspire. It will address him without the hollow sound- 
ing of words to mock the solemnity of what it says. 
It will have influence with him because it confides in 
him privately and makes him the unobserved discoverer 
of his own failings. It will benefit him, because his 
better nature, despite him, will be moved by all that is 
beautiful in its passages. In the presence of the true 
novel, man will grow erect in truth, as the human form, 
before the figure of the Apollo, unconsciously straight- 
ens itself — F. P. Deering. 



B2. The monthly reports of our Mercantile Library 
show that novels are as ten to one of all other books 
read in San Francisco. It is useless to quarrel with 
the fact, as it is absurd to quarrel with any primal pas- 
sion of our being. It is folly to cast a slight on novels, 
as a class. They constitute no class, but a mighty 
branch of literature. The Enfjlish and the German 
novels differ as much as a leopard and a hippopotamus. 
We are wont to speak of English books, pervaded with 
the Byronic spirit, as the "Satanic" in literature; but 
as Milton's fiend could find no bottom to the abyss, so 
from far deeper gulfs than any English novel ever 
opened, we see arising in the worst French fictions the 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 79 

presiding demon of all cancerous corruptions, issuing 
with appropriate odor, as if from Swedenborg's excre- 
mentitious hell. 

Bow with me to the genius of woman in modern 
times, as I call the roll of the choicer works of English 
fiction. Such creativeness as is displayed in the pro- 
duction of Charlotte Bronte and the author of "Adam 
Bede," has never been known since Shakespeare. A 
library of novels is like a gallery of pictures. One man 
saunters through it to see what the pictures are about; 
another sits down before the master-pieces to see what 
the artist was about; the first sees the paint, the second 
the paintings. It were well if every person, after read- 
ing a novel, were compelled to write out or to think out 
the axis of the whole. Suppose some reading circle 
should, at each session, agree to settle on one point, as 
to show which of all Scott's works exhibits the greater 
power; why Charles Reade, who is so brilliant in de- 
scription, so graphic and unapproachable in dialogue, 
can't sketch a character but he must desfrade both it 
and himself; why the close of Bulwer's " What Will 
He Do with It ? " is such an unmitigated piece of snob- 
bery that we feel inclined to pitch book and author to 
some place where types are never set up more; why 
Mrs. Stowe's "Dred," the first volume of which is far 
the grandest she ever wrote, in the second volume runs 
so swiftly to weakness and failure ; why the drawing of 
Rochester stands out more surprisingly on the tenth 
reading than on the first; why the author of "Adam 
Bede" is the most eminent of living novelists; why 



80 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

each character on her page stands out like a star against 
the bkie sky in a clear, cool night; why the "Mill on 
the Floss," though still an able and more bitter book, 
is inferior to "Adam Bede." I have often thought that 
perhaps the pulpit could do no better service than to 
discourse faithfully, once a quarter, on the health or 
disease of the novel that all the ladies in the parish are 
just reading. It is often remarked that when his eyes 
are shut, man cannot, except by the odor, distinguish 
between beef and mutton, elk and pork. It is no reason 
why he should not with his eyes open. — Thomas Starr 
King. 



EDUCATION A SUPREME DUTY. 

83. Minds there are, even in this generation, which 
outvalue, even according to the most material standard, 
all the rest of the world besides. The mind of Ericsson 
was a fortification to the whole coast of our country 
in time of war — of more worth than walls of earth and 
stone, on which millions have been spent. The active 
brain of Field set itself to work, and Europe and 
America became joined together by an imperishable 
band, like gigantic Siamese twins. The mind of Gari- 
baldi is Italy's hope of liberty. The mind of Bismarck 
contains Germany, centralized and united; and the 
traveller, whether he visits the cities or plains of Eu- 
rope, or ascends the Alps, still finds himself surrounned 
and enveloped by the intellect of Napoleon — dead half 
a century ago. 



LITERATURE AND EDUCATION. 81 

Minds there have been of so much service to the 
generation in which they have lived, that all the united 
efforts of the millions of their contemporaries were val- 
ueless beside a single reflection or a single thought of 
theirs; and minds like these may be in the neglected 
children around you. Is it sound mercantile sense 
to waste a product so rich and so accessible ? To use 
a California figure of speech, every child has in his in- 
tellect a mine of pay-ore; every one of these mines will 
richly pay the working, and sometimes it will happen to 
you to strike a pocket of intellect that will enrich your 
whole generation. When such a mind is lost, for want 
of cultivation, who can tell how far the advance of the 
world is retarded ? Who can say to what point of pro- 
gress the world would not have attained, had it had 
the benefit of the well developed powers of those 
minds which, for want of education, have been utterly 
lost ? How grand, how swelling might have been the 
song of the mute, inglorious Milton! How vast the 
discoveries of some Newton, who has lived his ignoble 
life with as little reflection as the clod he worked ! 
Who can tell but that minds have lived which, if edu- 
cated, would have told us the secret of the birth of the 
sun and stars, would trace life to its source, would 
have opened new worlds to our gaze, and brought old 
ones nearer together. I tremble as I think how near 
the world was to losing alto^^ether, for want of educa- 
tion, those glorious creations of Shakespeare. The 
accident that gave him to us makes us thrill, as it shows 
us how many stately ships of intellect, which have left 
their native haven freighted to the water's edg-c with 



82 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

the cargo for which mankind is famishing, have gone 
down in the darkness and the night. And if you wish 
that future generations should know and bless your 
name, link it to that of our great University, from 
whose loins shall spring the manly, stalwart minds, of 
which you will be the fathers. Aye, this is true fame — 
fame that lives. — JoJmi B. Felton. 




III. 

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 



PART III. 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 



B4. Duty. — God demands greatness of us all, and 
not goodness merely. There is not a person so humble 
or so feebly gifted that the call is not to him or to her. 
If we have few qualities that can influence, and but a 
narrow sphere to fill, still we have ourselves to develop 
and ourselves to rule. — Thomas Starr King. 

55. Out of the confusion and chaos of every un- 
finished, toilsome life, an Eden may arise; light may 
break forth. It is a vigilant regard for little things that 
begets happiness. — Sarah B. Cooper. 

56. Be prompt in your attention to professional 
calls, even if t4iey be not urgent, and be punctual in 
the fulfilment of your appointments. He who delays 
until evening that which he can and should do in the 
morning, carries a burden on his mind all day for 
nothing. It is prompt performance which enables some 
persons to accomplish so much more than others. 

—Dr. G. A. Shurtleff. 



84 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

B7. Life should bear good fruits. — Let me 
hope, for myself and us all, that when we have filled 
out our allotted space in this world; when we are at- 
tended by weeping friends, for the purpose of removing 
us to our last resting place, that it shall not be said of 
us that we have lived without purpose, but that we have 
gathered friends in the days of our manhood; that we 
have left fruits to bloom when we have departed. 

— Gen E. D. Baker. 

58. The seasons when men are used as pipes 
through which to blow the Divine breath of Inspira- 
tion are short and soon pass away. Extraordinary 
success always brings extraordinary trials in its bril- 
liant train, which must be met with becominsf fortitude. 

— Thomas Starr King. 

B9. In mirth, men are sincere; in sobriety, hypo- 
critical. It is behind the mask of gravity that the fan- 
tastic tricks which turn and overturn society are per- 
formed. Joy is more dificult to counterfeit than sor- 
row. We may cloud the sun with smoked glass, but 
we cannot dissipate the clouds with any telescope of 
human invention. — Hubert H. Bancroft. 

60. A PREMIUM on heels involves a discount on 
heads, while a fair valuation of each argues a healthy 
condition. — Sarah B Cooper. 

61. We must be not merely tolerant, but liberal; 
and must advance by the law, not of antagonism, but of 
sympathy. I do not care to acknowledge as my friend 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 85 

the man who is so narrow as to see nothing good out- 
side of his own Httle clique, or party, or faith, or race. 
I honor the cosmopoHtan soul. — Rev. VV. E. IJams. 

62. Each man is a divinely chartered corporation, 
to trade with all nature, to enrich himself by commerce 
with all that he can reach by any of his arts; and the 
moment that this commerce ceases, he begins to die, 
though he may continue to exist until all of his stored 
stock is exhausted. — T/ios. Starr Ki7ig. 

63. The justice of heaven is sure and unerring. 
Success may for a season gild a wicked career, and 
throw around it a false and illusive lustre, yet, just as 
certain as night follows the day, retribution waits on 
crime. This lesson is repeated in the pages of univer- 
sal history, is inscribed on the tombs of dead nations, 
and written in the experience of all living men. 

— Frank Tilford. 

64. A DANDY lives not by the clock or almanac, 
but from one neck-tie to another; a fashionable woman 
lives from one wrinkle to another; the politician from one 
Presidential election to another; the epicure from one 
turtle to another; the philosopher from the perception 
of one principle to the dawning of another; the phi- 
lanthropist from one act of charity to another. — Thos. 
Starr Kino-. 

65. On many a tomb-stone, where it is written, 
"Here lies so-and-so, aged seventy years," the true in- 
scription would read, 'Tn memory of a soul who, in 



86 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

seventy years, lived about five minutes, and that was 
when he first found himself in love." — Thos. Starr King. 

QQ. The popular notion that a ghost is a soul 
unclothed with a body, is fallacious ; your genuine 
ghost is a body not vitalized by a soul — a mere machine 
for converting potatoes and meat into the straps and 
cords of humanity. The soulless rich man is mere 
bank paper that adversity tears to shreds. The soul- 
less office-holder is a bladder, which at the expiration 
of his term of office, is pricked, collapses, and tumbles 
out of siorfit. But the dandv is entitled to stand in the 
first rank of ghosts — he is a whiskered essence, an 
organized perfume. — -TJiomas Starr King. 

67. If men, like balloons, could be allowed to cut 
loose from their bodies, and soar to their actual planes 
of culture and refinement, we should see some slinking 
into the alleys, some rising into the brilliant sphere of 
truth, some to the rosy realms of beauty, and some, the 
selected band, into the serene light of charity. It would 
be Dante's dream again, the series of circles narrowing 
down to the base of the pit, and circling with broader 
sweeps as it rose to the joys of Paradise. — Thomas 
Starr King. 

68. Noble Lives. — Life is a channel of intel- 
lectual power. Living is a fine art. Great lives mean 
more than the noblest orations. There are facts in 
Fenelon's life that are as rich and eloquent as any 
passages in Shakespeare. Washington was not felt as 
a literary power; his words do not kindle us; but his 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 87 

faith, decision, fortitude did, and continue to. His 
soul lived a literature more terrible to despotism than 
ever was penned. We speak of Cordelia as one of 
Shakespeare's noblest creations, and Jennie Deans as 
one of Scott's richest productions. Is it any less to be 
a Jennie Deans or a Cordelia than to write her ? Is 
the echo more musical than the notes that create it, or 
the mirror's reflection more perfect than the face that is 
mirrored ? If lives could take outward shape, we 
would learn better to appreciate their nobleness. — Thos. 
Starr King. 

69. Let your thoughts grow. To have beautiful 
thoughts and suppress them, is like destroying the seed 
of a beautiful flower. How can you have beautiful 
flowers unless you cultivate and cherish them ? First 
preparing the soil best adapted to their growth, and 
selecting those seeds and plants you wish to cultivate, 
you are well repaid in beholding them spring up to greet 
you with beauty and fragrance. How pleasant to see 
homes decorated with those beautiful teachers of love 
and purity. We can cultivate beautiful thoughts by ex- 
pressing such as come to us, freely, without stint, with- 
out thinking how they will please. When you have a 
train of beautiful thoughts, be free to speak them. It 
may incline other minds to new ideas which may draw 
forth the language of harmony. How many beautiful 
ideas have been suppressed, for fear of what the world 
might say — thoughts that flow like living waters from 
the soul. — M. y. Up/mm. 



88 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

70. Marriage. — As we advance in life the cordage 
of kindred breaks away. Aged parents drop in the 
tomb. We know that sisterly fondness, once so earnest, 
has diverged into a new channel. A husband and off- 
spring have become the reservoirs of her affections. 
The stern cares of life have longf agfo solidified a 
brother's heart. It is true we form occasional and 
strong frienships with the outer world. They are 
rarely more, however, than companionable and mental 
affinites. They ruffle a little the heart's surface, while 
the emotional depths are undisturbed. There is no 
union and interblending of soul. In intercourse with 
his fellows, the most communicative man reserves a 
host of sensations and delicate sensibilities. They are 
the soft murmurinofs and dulcet warblinsfs from the 
better and purer portions of our nature. He feels it 
profanation to breathe them into the ear of his dearest 
male friend. A mother could sympathize with them. 
But since she is dead they have sunk back upon the 
heart. They will lie there forever, unless a loved and 
confiding wife attract them forth by the magnetism of 
a tender and unsullied soul. This unfettered inter- 
communion of feeling is the joy and rivet of the 
marriage tie. If falsehood or concealment intervene on 
either side, a calamitous future will inevitably ensue. 

— James G. Howard. 

71. The tree of Love should have generous oppor- 
tunity to strike root, and gather strength and tenacity, 
before the scion of marriage be crafted into it ; for, 
though shoot and stock become thereafter one tree, yet 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 89 

the graft determines the kind of fruit it shall bear. Be- 
fore marriage, Love's Inquisition should be keen-eyed, 
keen-eared, almost relentless, in ferreting out the subtle 
faults and weaknesses of the enthroned ideal ; but, after 
leaving the bridal altar, all inquisitorial robes should be 
thrown aside at once and forever, and upon the threshold 
of every new day should be inscribed the gentle sug- 
gestion : 

Be to each fault a little blind; 

Be to each failing wondrous kind. 

— Sarah B. Cooper. 

72. Oh, Charity ! friend of the fatherless, com- 
forter of the afflicted ! On thy starry brow is stamped 
the sign-manual of the Omnipotent ; on thy cheek is 
the smile of heaven; in thy hand is the balsam of life. 
Child of Christianity ! in the quivering light that gleams 
in thy glowing features are seen the emblems of Peace, 
Joy and Hope ! Thy softening and refining influence 
is divinely sweeter on the great ocean of life, as it ebbs 
and flows and beats upon the shores of time, than 
silvery notes of music, which, rippling o'er the moon- 
li<Tht waves, ravish the delic^hted soul of man. What 
pleasant memories dost thou not bring with thee! 
What delicate flowers dost thou not plant in our 
hearts! What poems, filled with jeweled thoughts, 
dost thou not whisper in our ears! The pencil that 
would paint thy beauties should be tipped with the hues 
of heaven! — Francis J. Sullivan. 

73. There is no such thing as infallible affection. 
From the apples of discord is expressed the vinegar of 



90 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

hate ; while from the sweet grapes of kindness is dis- 
tilled the wine of perpetual bliss. — Sarah B. Cooper. 

74. He who composes a poem that has no burning 
thought in it, is not so original as he who constructs an 
original mouse-trap. The one is a mere artisan in 
words, the other an original thinker in wire and wood. 

— Tho7nas Starr King. 

7B. There are two classes of men not to be inti- 
midated. They are the saints who believe in the " Love 
of God," and the savants who believe in the "Reign 
of Law." These two ideas are profoundly tanquilizing. 
— Rev. W. E. Ijams. 

76. Discipline. — 

Upon the patient earth 
A thousand tempests beat, 
To call to life the flowers 
That make her Mad and sweet. 

So, o'er the human heart 
The countless griefs that roll 
But wake immortal joy 
To bloom within the soul. 

— Ina D. Coolbrith. 

11. "The Brave Days of Old."— Ah! talk not to 
me of living then and now. We plume ourselves, poor 
fools, and say that more of life is given us in the short 
space we run it through, than was vouchsafed our ances- 
tors a century or two ago in thrice the time. Puffed 
up by our mechanical contrivances which we call science, 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 91 

our parcelling- out of earth and ores which we call 
wealth, our libertinism which we call liberty; casting 
ourselves adrift from our faith, calling in question the 
wisdom and goodness of our Maker, throwing off all 
law but the law of lust, all affection save avarice and 
epicurism, we plunge headlong into some pandemonium, 
or cast ourselves under some soul-crushing juggernaut 
of progress, and call it life, and boast one year of such 
demoniacal existence to be worth ten, aye a hundred, of 
the old-time sort.— Htcbert H. Bancroft. 

78. Greatness. — Our tests of the kinds of great- 
ness are apt to be defective. The world rates that 
highest which upheaves, demolishes and ruins. If at 
night some constellation should suddenly begin to shoot 
out Bengal lights, flooding the heavens with pyrotechnics, 
the world would look up and admire the power of the 
Deity; or if some filibustering comet should kindfe the 
azure with flame, men would say, "Now, at last, we 
see the finger of God," who never have noticed the 
imperial bounty of the sun, and never have admired its 
unerring punctuality. Happily the center of our solar 
system has no French ambition for display. If the 
sober sun would, it could spill over sheets of flame 
from its full caldron that would wrap in fire the fifty 
globes that it is now content to robe with verdure and 
paint in flowers. It is a magnificent symbol of charac- 
ter. — Tkos. Starr King. 

79. The Human Temple. — In physiology, and 
in the history of diseases, you have the image or sym- 



92 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

bol of every spiritual distemper. Whoever deals with 
the body of man, deals with the highest production of 
the Divine Architect. The Almighty published more 
wisdom in the humblest man that walks the earth than 
in the solar system. Man is the crown of matter. 
Whoever lives has stepped into a body provided for 
him, with no less evidences of divine skill than were 
displayed when He harnessed the forces of the universe. 
Every pain that afflicts the body has its symbol in the 
sins that infest the soul; and in the rhetoric of diseases 
you can describe every trouble of the body or of the 
State ; there is no single bad element of the body but 
can be represented by analogy of the body's sicknesses; 
no noble grace of body, purity of blood, elasticity of 
heart, or bounding pulse, but has its analogue in the 
soul. Does not God, by these crossing lines, write that 
Godliness and health are inseparably connected ? 

— Thos. Starr King. 

80. Morality Essential to Success.— A pure, 
irreproachable moral character is essential to success. 
It is the impregnable fortress in all the battles of life. 
It affords a sense of security in every difficulty, and 
inspires a feeling of courage, self-appreciation and reli- 
ance, when one's progress is assailed by the viler 
elements of human nature. To how many distinguished 
personages, to how many public fiduciaries, to how 
many great financial and business institutions might I 
point, that, for want of a proper moral ground-work and 
solidity, have fallen in the very hour of apparent tri- 
umph ! No hereditary prestige, no admitted social 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 93 

elevation, no wealth which silver and gold represent, no 
literary accomplishments, no scientifiic attainments, no 
endowment of genius, no learning and skill, nor all 
these combined, can secure the greatest possible profes- 
sional success without an integrity of character which 
shall command public confidence and become a recog- 
nized, steadfast quality of the individual. The dis- 
tinctions of public and professional life only serve to 
make moral defects, if they exist, more conspicuous, as 
the polish of the lapidary on precious stones selected 
for display, reveals the unsightly flaws which obscurity 
had concealed. — Dr. G. A. Shurtlcff. 

81. The Influence of Example. — The will within 
us is the ultimate fact of consciousness; yet how little 
have the best of us, in acquirements, in position, even 
in character, that may be credited entirely to ourselves! 
How much to the influences that have moulded us! 
Who is there, wise, learned, discreet, or strong, who 
might not, were he to trace the inner history of his 
life, turn like the stoic Emperor to give thanks to the 
gods, that by this one and that one, and here and there, 
good examples have been set him, noble thoughts have 
reached him, and happy influences have touched to 
bless him ? Who is there that with his eyes about him 
has reached the meridian of life, who has not sometimes 
echoed the thought of the pious Englishman as the 
criminal passed to the gallows: "But for the grace of 
God, there go I." — Henry George. 

82. All Does Not Fade. — The few legends of 



94 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

the deluge, of God's providence, and a few facts in the 
writings of the Babylonian historian relating to the 
kingdom of the Supreme, have adhered to the keel of 
history, while the waves of time have submerged almost 
all beside. The acts of many great warriors, the phi- 
losophic speculations of sages, the big scrolls that 
recorded them, have all perished. What a lesson for 
us all! Earthly grandeur and wisdom are mean and 
rotten things. But acts of love to God and beneficence 
to our race are glorious and eternal. The tear of 
tenderness in a child's eye glitters in the sight of angels 
in heaven, though the most brilliant words and deeds of 
the great appear at that distance opaque and valueless. 
The secret sigh of a penitent heart Is heard by those 
that surround the majestic throne of the Almighty, 
though the huzzas of the multitude, and the explosions 
of the field of victory only shake the dull atmosphere 
above us, and soon die away to be heard no more. 

— Rev. William Speer. 

83. Conflict Eternal. — You enter a great 
factory. You are dazed and deafened by the din and 
clangor of the whirling machinery, by the buzz of the 
spindles, the clatter of the loom, the hiss of the belting, 
the grinding of the shafts, the churning of the engine. 
The noise is disagreeable, but It must be tolerated. 
The noise is the audible expression, the articulate speech 
of work. Stop the noise and you stop the work. 
And In this seethinsf sea of sounds — this deli- 
rlum of noisy tumult, this dizzy maze of flashing 
wheels and flying shuttles — there is perfect order. The 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 95 

engineer, with hand on the throttle of the engine, sends 
the pulsing life through every vein and fibre of the vast 
organism. Every cog and wheel and shaft and spindle 
becomes animate. A mass of raw material is caught 
up in the eddy of this maelstrom of mechanism, and 
comes out the perfected fabric. 

So in human society, the tumult and agitation, the 
strife and warfare, are but the clatter of the machinery, 
the grinding of the mills of God. Stop the racket in the 
world's great work-shop, and you stop its work. Close 
the valve of the engine of human progress, and the 
silence of death comes over the world. And so the con- 
flict will go on — must go on and on forever. As long 
as there is growth there will be agitation. As long 
as there is development there will be friction. While 
seasons roll, the sun shines and the stars glitter, 
there will be the clash of warring forces. While man 
toils, suffers and aspires, some vexed question will dis- 
tract human counsels, some knotty problem v/ill per- 
plex the soul of the student. When all the questions 
have been settled, when all the problems have been 
solved, when the world's orreat debatinof school has 
closed its doors forever, this round earth on which we 
strut our brief, unquiet existence, will have been re- 
manded to the limbo of dead planets. 

I cannot think even of heaven as a place of eternal, 
unvarying rest — a place where saints in glory fold their 
hands in immortal listlessness; where cherubim and 
seraphim, angels and archangels pass endless aeons of 
ennuied existence, divorced from care and work. I 
prefer to think of it as a place of ceaseless but blissful 



96 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

activity, where every faculty of mind and soul finds 
range for expansion and incentive to growth ; where 
ransomed spirits shall compete for angelic honors, and 
press forward toward the shining summits of the celes- 
tial Zion.^ — Samuel Williams. 

84. The Suspicious Man. — There is not in the 
world a being more unfit to live in it, to perform the 
ordinary business of life, to be successful in his under- 
takings, than the man who has become suspicious and 
distrustful, who attributes bad motives to acts, and who 
has lost confidence in his kind. He may have arrived 
at his conclusions from a bitter experience; he may 
have been often cheated and deceived; where he had a 
right to look for gratitude he may have encountered 
the cold look or averted eye ; but he has made the mis- 
take of taking the exception for the rule. He has 
reasoned to himself: " Because I have been deceived, 
man is deceitful; because I have had kindness met with 
ingratitude, man is ungrateful." What is there for such 
a man to do but to hang himself, like Timon? He is 
but one; he can not be ubiquitous; he cannot always 
wake and watch. How can such a man perform large 
enterprises, where trust in many men is necessary ? 
How can he be a General, where he must rely upon 
the highest qualities in thousands ? How can he be a 
statesman, when he has no faith that the laws he frames 
have any goodness in human nature to address them- 
selves to ^ How can he perform the slightest task, 
when he stands on the outside of the great army of 
mankind, ready to run at the first sign of approach '^ 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 97 

Man is so constituted that even the intellect of Napo- 
leon can only work through the brains and arms of others. 
What a feeble creature Napoleon would have been if 
he had not had implicit reliance on man ! Instead of 
such a man drawing strength and inspiration from 
others, their strength would be to him a constant men- 
ace; their enthusiasm would be hypocrisy; their faces, 
lighted into radiance at his approach, would be the 
mask to hide the malicious, envious and deceitful heart. 
And what is the condition of him who has failed to 
gain the sympathy of his fellow-men ! How his own 
sympathies wither and fade, deprived of the sunlight 
that beams from other human hearts ! What fruit or 
flower grows on the barren waste of his intellect? The 
voice of the heart becomes mute when it speaks to ears 
that are deaf — John B. Felton. 

86. Men of Thought and Men of Action. — The 
man of action is as necessary to the man of thought, 
as woman is, as a wife, toman; and either one of them 
is a dead failure without the other. The man of action 
takes up the living thoughts that have been born from 
the brain of the thinker, and turns them into useful 
things. Whence all our commerce, whence all our 
practical science ? First the great thinker, then the 
practical man. I admire the heroism of the men of 
action. I admire the bravery of the men who will take 
a system of thought and put it into life, and make it 
redound to the glory of man. W^e have glorious heroes 
in commerce, in agriculture, and in all the practical 
affairs of life, and not one is less glorious than the 



98 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Other. The man of action and the man of thought 
stand as twin-brothers — I would say as man and wife. 
Whence the vitaHty, the astonishing vitaHty of this 
country ? Why is it that in the old lands people are so 
sluesfish ? It is because the men of action and the 
men of thought are kept apart, and hence there are no 
children, and the man of action providing no seed, 
runs to seed, and the man of thought piles up thought 
that has to wait probably hundreds of years for some 
man of action to get hold of it. Here the University 
and the primary school stand hand in hand; and it will 
be to our glory, showing us that in the future the man 
of thought and the man of action will strike hands; 
and the very fact that on festive occasions we recognize 
this relationship, is proof that in future we are to have 
a magnificent race — the thinker appreciating the man 
of action, and the latter in return appreciating the 
thinker. — Rev. J. H. C. Bonte. 

86. Truth. — Make all the deductions which you 
will, and see how much there is left in the nature of 
man to sympathize with and to love. There is truth — 
lying and deceit are but the exceptions — and the basest 
man yields to a temptation and swerves from his own 
innate desire when he lies. The great protection which 
the law gives to property and life is based on the gen- 
eral devotion to truth in men. In the oath adminis- 
tered to the witness, when on the story he tells hangs 
a human life, the law\ with an experience taught it by 
ages of reflection on human nature, appeals, and ap- 
peals with safety, to two great attributes common to all 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 91) 

men — reverence and truth. Relying on man's love to 
God and his devotion to truth, the juryman renders his 
verdict and the judge pronounces sentence. Every 
commercial principle and every rule of business take 
for granted and assume the existence of original high 
moral qualities in man. The credit system, the prom- 
issory note, the trust in a man's word, the relation of 
servant to master, of principal to his agent, all have 
lying at their base the principle that when no eye is on 
him, when temptation to do wrong holds out impunity, 
when interest conflicts with duty, man's nature is worthy 
of trust. Analyze every custom of society, and you 
will find that it implies and assumes that human nature 
is good, true, kind, benevolent, full of reverence and 
love. The desire to please, love of your kind, benevo- 
lence, charity, all lie at the base of the evening party, 
the social dinner, the elaborate toilet, the courteous 
salutation, the curtsy and bow. — Johi B. Fclton. 



HOME. 

87. Never is there a home like the home of our 
youth; never such sunshine as that which makes shadows 
for us to play in; never such air as that which swells our 
little breasts and gives our happy hearts free expression; 
P never such water as the lauQfhincr, dancinsf streamlet in 
J which we wade through silvery bubblings over glitter- 
ing pebbles; never such music as the robin's roundelay 
and the swallow's twittering that wakes us in the morn- 
ing; the tinkling of the cow-bells; the rustling of the 



100 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

vines over the window; the chirrup of the cricket; and 
the striking of the old house-clock, that tells our task 
is done. The home of our childhood, once abandoned, 
is forever lost. It may have been a hut, standing on 
the ugliest patch of ground die earth affords, yet so 
wrapt round the heart is it, so charged with youthful 
imagery is every stick and stone of it, that the gilded 
castle, built in after life, with all the rare and costly 
furnishings that art and ingenuity can afford, is but an 
empty barn beside it. — Htibert H. Bancroft. 

88. Every man should own his home, if he can. 
That philosophy which tells a man to drift on over the 
ocean of this uncertain life without a home of his own, 
is wrone. The man who does not own his home is 
like a ship out on the open sea, at the hazards of the 
storm. The man who owns his home is like a ship that 
has arrived in port and moored in a safe harbor. One 
man should no more be content to live in another man's 
house, if he can build one of his own, than one bird 
should annually take the risk of hatching in another bird's 
nest; and for my own part, I would rather be able to 
own a cottage than to hire a palace. I often see men 
eager to effect an insurance upon their lives, and this is 
well— it is rieht. But the man who owns his home has 
effected an insurance upon his happiness and the happi- 
ness of his family — which is as much to him, if his 
mind be right, as his own, and constitutes his own. I 
have seen the homes of the people in foreign lands; I 
have heard them talk of their condition and lot in life, 
and this is the main theme of thought with mankind 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 101 

everywhere. As I listened to them I discovered how 
it is that the Switzer, in his hut in the Alps, where the 
limit of vegetation is reached and the winter storm 
howls and rages around him, is happier than the Italian 
tenant on the beautifui plains of Lombardy, amidst the 
bloom and fragrance of perpetual summer. It is the 
consciousness of the ownership of a home which, no 
matter how the storm rages, nobody can take from him, 
and which he can make happy in spite of the storm. 
I would say to every man, buy a home if you can, and 
own it. If a windfall has come to you, buy a home 
with it. If you have laid up enough by toil, buy a 
home. If you have made money in stocks, buy a home. 
Do not let anybody tempt you to put all your winnings 
back into the pool. Take out enough to buy a home, 
and buy it. Put the rest back if you will. Gamble on 
it if you must, but buy the home first. Buy it and sell 
it not. Then the roses that bloom there are yours. 
The jessamine and clematis that climb upon the porch 
belong to you. You have planted them and seen them 
grow. When you are at work upon them you are 
working for yourselves and not for others. If children 
be there, then there are flowers within the house and 
without. — George Ba^^stow. 

88. A man's house should, and to some extent 
must, express the tendencies of his vital breath. Beasts 
burrow into the earth for physical shelter. A man, be- 
sides shelter, will hint his ofreatness in the size of his 
house, his love of floral beauty in his carpets, his sweet 
memory of the water-courses in his service pipes, his 



102 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

bounty in his larder and his table. The pictures on his 
wall, the books on his shelves, his furniture, will have 
some strong vascular ties to himself, and we ought no 
more to be able to step out of our own houses into other 
men's, and feel at home there, than we can step out of 
our skins into other people's. Like crabs and lobsters, 
which sweat their shells, our houses should be the true 
representations of ourselves, and should distinctly show 
the shape of our tasks and methods of life. — Thomas 
Starr King. 



CHILDHOOD. 

90. The cost and care of properly feeding, cloth- 
ing and educating the child, are but the price which 
nature demands of parents for the incomparable treas- 
ure of the child's love, honor and obedience; and just 
in proportion to the extent to which parents neglect or 
refuse to pay this price, in precisely the same propor- 
tion do they forfeit their right to this inestimable boon. 

— ZacJiary Mo7itgoniery . 

91. Saddest of all the sights of a great city, such 
as San Francisco, are the little children of the quarters 
where poverty hides — saddest and most menacing. 
Pinched, ragged, and dirty; yet in every little body a 
human soul; in every little body latent powers that 
might strengthen and bless society, but that may only 
awake to curse, perhaps to destroy. Is it not waste and 
worse ? Out of just such human stuff have grown earth's 
best and noblest; and out of such waste have come the 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 103 

vermin that have gnawed, and the wolves that have 
destroyed — they who have shattered the domes of 
national glory, and in palace walls given the wild dog a 
lair. Who shall wrap himself up and say, "This is not 
my affair?" — Henry George. 

92. We should begin laboring in the regions of 
mind, muscle, or morals, almost simultaneous with being. 
W^e prune the tree soon after it lifts its head above the 
earth's surface. The trunk is straightened, the extra 
branches taken off, the soil around well stirred ; and 
then we look forward to the time when we can sit down 
in its deep shade to contemplate the goodness of the 
great Creator. So in the physical development of the 
child, care and attention are requisite; wholesome food, 
warm clothing, fresh air, and a proper amount of exer- 
cise. Unless these things are provided, the child will 
be a dwarf, unable to meet and cope single-handed 
with the thousand ills that flesh is heir to. The rule 
will hold good in the domain of mind. The parent 
must direct the mind of the child into the rifrht chan- 
nel ; give it books to study that refine and elevate. 
There is a kind of literature extant that is pernicious, 
more poisonous than the exhalations of a stagnant pool, 
spreading a blight over the whole being. Books that 
a few years ago were not seen in parlors, are nov/ sold 
publicly, and read publicly by public men. Encyclope- 
dist and pamphleteer, philosopher and demagogue, are 
uniting in giving organic structure and form to unbelief 
and impiety, elevating them to the dignity of sciences, 
and reducing blasphemy to a trade. You must begin 



104 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

with a child before its habits of Hfe and modes of 
thought are fixed ; then, if it goes astray, you have 
cleared your own skirts. To God it stands or falls. 

— Rev. T. H. B. Andci^son. 



93. Asceticism. — Did it ever strike you that the 
asceticism of the middle ages, which retreated to the 
cloister, content with water-cresses as a bill of fare, was 
never very fruitful of high and profound discourse ? 
The philosopher who goes up into the clouds to talk, 
and prefers gruel to trout before going, makes an epi- 
gfastric mistake. He has taken in the wrons: ballast, 
and has omitted some good phosphorescent material 
which miofht have created a nimbus around his head 
as he entered the clouds. A mistake in the gastric re- 
Sfion leads to errors of the head and heart. I do not 
know whether there is any ground of hope for a people 
who have not only invented cast-iron stoves, but have 
invented "help" in the form of the she-Titans, who 
have made a wholesome dinner well-nigh impossible. 
Death on a pale horse is poetical enough; but death in 
the black stove of many a kitchen is terribly realistic. 

— W. C. BartletL 

94. Friendship. — There is no solitude like soul- 
solitude. Often, to be with the multitude is to be most 
alone; and sometimes to be most alone is to enjoy the 
divinest fellowship. Friendship, the most sacred and 
helpful, do not make contact an absolute condition of 
communion or ministration. The subtle law of sympa- 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 105 

thy defies distance; it permits conscious fellowship in 
the most abject isolation, and evokes the glad and 
grateful reponse, "Yet, I am not alone." 

To make a full and perfect friendship, there must be 
harmony of taste, feeling, and aspiration; the natures 
must match each other in every faculty. There is such 
a thing as kinship in this regard, apart from that ten- 
derer sentiment which we call love. In the selection 
of its companionships, the soul is dominated by laws 
all its own. In every perfect friendship there is honest 
comradeship of spirit — a kind of duality in unity. The 
surest guarantees for the perpetuity and advantage of 
such friendships are education, culture, character and 
moral worth. 

Friendship of the noblest type is love refined of its 
dross, clarified and etherialized ; it is unselfish, con- 
stant, self- forgetting. In its devotion it disdains it- 
self, and in calamity it is inflexible as adamant.— 5^ r^/z 
B. Cooper. 

9B. Sympathy. — It was my happiness once to 
know one of the most gifted of his race, and to be ad- 
mitted to his intimate society. He had been, in his 
earlier life and in matured manhood, a lawyer; but the 
glory of our great countryman. Washington Allston, 
turned him aside from the studies of his youth, and in 
his later life he gave himself up to Art. The noise and 
bustle of the court, and the angry contention of men 
jostling each other in their struggle for antago- 
nistic interests, had disgusted him with his fellow-men, 
and so he betook himself to a beautiful solitary crag 



106 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

overlooking the ocean. I saw him there. He showed 
me his paintings. He made me see and feel his beau- 
tiful conceptions. I expressed my gratification. "Sir,'' 
said he, "I perceive that you do not understand paint- 
ing, but your voice is full of sympathy. Often the 
farmers come to see me, and they say, as they look upon 
my historical paintings, on which I have labored night 
and day, waking and sleeping and in dreams, to infuse 
life and beauty of ideal expression and grace, 'why 
don't you paint portraits ? ' Paint portraits ! Why, the 
idea makes me shudder. But then it comes to me in 
my solitude, clothed in a human voice, and that a kind 
one." ''Yes," he continued, "this solitary life is a 
chimera. We must see in livins: faces that we have 
the sympathy of our fellow-men. Our ears must drink 
in their voices. Mine thirst to hear them." 

Sympathy! W^hy, it is when all men sympathize with 
us that we are conscious of high powers, that courage 
and hope nerve our arms. It is in the crowd, amid the 
roaring of cannons and the crash of wrecks, but with 
the human voice in his ears, with its answering hurrah, 
that the sailor cheers, as the waves stifle his utterance, 
and his dying hands hold above the water the still 
lighted torch, in a last effort to fire the gun. Put the 
same sailor alone on the solitary raft, in the dark night, 
upon the ocean, and the wind, as it hurls the billows 
over him, bears away but a moan of agony and despair. 

The real martyrdom of Marie Antoinette was not 
when the ax of the guillotine, in mercy, descended. It 
came when in that long march to death she saw in faces 
upturned in scorn, in balconies crowded with men and 



IlIE COxNDUCT OF LIFE. 107 

women deridinc^ her agony, in the stern features of the 
soldiers around, that her kind had excluded her from 
the pale of sympathy. From a window above her, as 
she passes on. a mother holds out her child, and the 
little one stretches forth its arms, as motioning to em- 
brace the dying queen. At that proof that one kind 
heart, in all that crowd, feels for her, the rigid features 
relax, the set teeth open, the brow unbends, and the 
stony eyes fill with tears. 

But while a man must have the sympathy of his kind 
as a necessity of his nature, to gratify a want imperious 
as hunger, if he wishes to be great, to have a profound 
respect for himself, to be constantly urged forward to 
heroic deeds, he must have the close, intimate, particu- 
lar sympathy of some class or order. He must be 
united to men by some peculiar bond of a common 
absorbing interest, by the tie of some cause to which 
they all consecrate their lives, by the union in a kindred 
pursuit, to which their minds and hearts are wedded. 

In this order must be his life; to it his affections must 
be given ; for each member of it he must cultivate re- 
spect, and from it he must receive his distinction and 
reward. Is he covetous of power ? He must first 
labor to make his order powerful, and then strive to 
wield himself its united force. Is he anxious for the 
respect, love, and admiration of his fellow-man } He 
must find it in the respect, love, and admiration of the 
members of his own profession, who are capable of 
appreciating him ; and the feeling inspired among his 
fellows, will extend itself to the world. Nor is there 
any danger that, thus merged in a class, he will lose his 



108 CALIFORNIA. ANTHOLOGY. 

individuality. On the contrary, by contact with others, 
engaged in the same pursuit, by generous rivalry, by 
the stimulus which comes from great deeds or discover- 
ies of kindred spirits, his own peculiar power is excited, 
developed and felt. — Johii B. Felton. 

96. What Life May Be. — To widen the compre- 
hension of what life may be, consider that every mind 
is a digestive system, every sense an avenue or duct 
for transmitting nutriment from without to the living 
spirit. Beauty is as real a thing as a flower. The corn 
and market stuffs of the Saco valley go into the grana- 
ries and cellars of but few people, but there are many 
men out of New England who carry the slopes and 
ridges, the rocky tendons and the dome itself of Mount 
Washington with them wherever they go. They coil 
their strenofth around the White Hills as an anaconda 
coils about a goat ; they crush and swallow and digest 
them, and live on their riotous strength ever. What 
Creation has poured of its spirit into its deep notches 
and gorges, they drink in as a bee sips honey from a 
flower ; they sip of it in the honey of art. Look at a 
great picture. What is its substance '^ The canvas '^ the 
pigments that may be scraped off and weighed in scales.f* 
Or is it the suggestion that the painter has made to 
bloom above his group of colored patches, or the saintly 
expression that he has laid on with his oils ? What 
nature means is more than what nature physically is. 
Indeed, we are born to live royally ; to feed on sliced 
stars and strata, and the philosophy of Bacon. — TJws. 
Starr King. 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 109 

RICHES. 

97. I do not know -which is the more deplorable, to 
be without money or to be its slave. Money is the 
best of servants, but the worst of masters. As a servant 
it is the "open-sesame" to all the world, the master- 
key to all enerc^ies, the passport to all hearts; as a mas- 
ter it is a very demon, warping the judgment, searing 
the conscience and fossilizing the affections. Wrapped 
by their cold silence in an eternal slumber deep as that 
of Endymion, its victims are lost to the beauties of 
earth and the glories of heaven. Give me the inde- 
pendence, the command of myself, of my time, my talents, 
my opportunities, that wealth alone can give, but save 
me from the gluttony of greed, the fetters of avarice, 
the blind beastliness and intellectual degradation en- 
gendered by an inordinate heaping up of riches. 

— Hubert H. Bancroft. 

98. If an aroma could always attend gold, telling 
you by what ways it was gained, whether it was in- 
herited or won by enterprise and skill; and, if earned, 
whether in ways useful or hurtful to the higher interests 
of society, there would be no danger of a mean worship 
of money. If a man's silver and gold told the story 
at once whether he earned it in makini^: suQ-ar or turn- 
ing it into liquor — in raising wheat or in speculating on 
it — in weaving honest cloth or in weaving shoddy, in 
putting soles to shoes for soldiers or sham ones which 
prove that the makers hadn't any souls at all, money 
would carry its own judgment with it. In any such 



110 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

system the farmer need not fear to let the aroma of his 
money expend itself far and wide. It would sprinkle 
the wholesomeness of winds, the perfume of blossoms, 
the strengthening smell of the soil, the fragrance of 
noblest uses. — Thomas Starr King. 

99. Next to being born blind or deaf, or otherwise 
deformed or diseased, the greatest calamity that can 
happen one is to be born rich. The greatest calamity 
because the chances are a hundred to one that beside 
becoming thereby enervated in body and mind, such a 
person, when pricked by those adversities which sooner 
or later befall, will collapse like a blown bladder. To 
the wealthy of California was given one blessing forever 
denied their children: they were born poor. They 
were the makers of their money; and that in itself im- 
plies some merit, howsoever unintcllectual they were 
satisfied to remain, or howsoever immoral some of 
them may have become in the operation. For a pas- 
sionate pursuit of wealth is in itself debasing; but pas- 
sionate progress does not long continue. Not less than 
the unsuccessful, the fortunate in the struggle for wealth 
die; and the generation following, lacking, peradventurc, 
the money grasping mania, will not exert itself as did 
its predecessor; and to every five hundred who ride 
their father's fast horses to the devil, perhaps five turn 
their attention to ennobling pastimes. 

In all the abnormities of moral economy, there is 
none so productive of evil as this laborless inheriting 
of the results of labor. Nature nowhere so debases 
herself. The vine-root and the flower-stalk, workers 



THE COxNDUCT OF LIFE. Ill 

with the invisible in Hfe's great laboratory, in the subtle 
chemistry of their own secret processes, bring from the 
same soil, each after its kind, painted and performed 
fruits and flowers, which are nature's riches. Wealth 
is the product of labor applied to natural objects, and 
to be of benefit to the individual, must grow from his 
own personal efforts. The productiveness of a com- 
munity depends upon the knowledge and skill of its 
members, rather than upon natural advantages. 

— Hubert H. Bancroft. 

100. What is it, canst thou tell me, Oh Sidi Ben 
Hamet, richest of the' rich men of Blida! What magfic 
influence is there in money, that it should change the 
very features of humanity — that it should beget twink- 
ling little eyes without a visible spark of the divine 
essence in them, and noses that seem made to smell out 
the flaws of a sinful and erring world, that the owners 
may run up a debit against their fellow creatures — that 
it should give to the human countenance, intended by 
nature to be the mirror of the soul, such a low, grovel- 
ing and imperturbable character— dry up the warm 
blood of youth, stifle the noblest emotions implanted in 
the human breast, and leave but the shell of a man to 
mock at all that is noble, generous and manly } I hold 
the doctrine that, as the features of herdsmen become 
in the course of time like those of the animals with 
whom they associate, and married couples grow to 
resemble each other in a long series of years, so bankers 
and brokers begin after a while to acquire a metallic 
expression and a jingling tone of voice, as if permeated 



112 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

with the sheen and essence of precious metals. A 
gentleman of my acquaintance in the banking business 
has a habit, when asked for a small loan, of opening 
his eyes and looking straight at you without the slight- 
est perceptible emotion of sympathy or pity. His eyes, 
on occasions of this kind, bear a wonderful resemblance 
to a couple of new ten-cent pieces^ — they stare at you 
with a quiet assurance, but give no indication of any- 
thing hopeful or pleasant. But what matters it, O, 
Sidi Ben Hamet, thou richest of the rich men of Blida, 
that you have plenty of money and I but little ? Have 
you not plenty of trouble too ? Do you never' get the 
toothache ? Are you exempt from gout ? Can you eat 
more, drink more, or wear more than just enough, with- 
out paying the penalty in some shape or other ? Do 
you think your wealth makes you independent ? On 
the contrary don't you feel that it makes you a slave ? 
You have to stay by your coffers and your specula- 
tions, or you lose your all. 

You know no such thing as freedom. It is only 
happy-go-lucky vagabonds like us who can claim to be 
independent. We can travel and see the world ; we 
can skim the cream of it, and leave you thin milk. 
Having nothing to lose, we have no concern about 
losing it. A little satisfies us — just to be able to keep 
moving, seeing, hearing and enjoying; whilst with you, 
O Sidi ! the rust of care is ever gnawing upon your 
vitals. When you have accumulated millions, what 
will you do with it ? As you brought nothing into this 
world, so you can take nothing out of it. What a 
pleasant subject of contemplation it must be for a rich 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 113 

man on his death-bed! A life worn out in toil and 
trouble to accumulate money ; a dozen graceless scamps 
waiting impatiently for him to die, that they may pounce 
upon it and spend it gloriously! Well, the Creator has 
balanced these things very nicely, it must be admitted. 
Neither you nor I could do it so well, with all our 
boasted sagacity, O sublime and potent Sidi Ben 
Hamet ! — y. Ross Browne. 

INTEMPERANCE. 

101. It is the grand overruling factor in insanity. 
It is the great Nihilist and Communistic agitator of 
rational government. The whisky-bottle is the gun 
used to force the ballot box, and its aim threatens to 
be fatal to that order which is Heaven's first law. 

—Dr. A. B. Stout. 

102. Intemperance is the great recruiting officer 
in the employment of ignorance, crime, insanity and 
suicide. The system of manufacturing drunkards is 
fostered by by our man-making and man-ruling govern- 
ment with care, energy and efBciency, as though a thor- 
oughly manufactured and confirmed drunkard were 
worth to society two ordinary sober men. But no 
sooner is the human reduced to and below the grade 
of the brute, than the law and courts and executive 
oiihcers treat him accordingly. — Gat. yohn A. Collins. 

103. In the brawny chest and muscular arm of 

Heenan there is soinethino^ to admire, somethinor more 
8 <b ' & 



114 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

than a mere idea; and the battering of a human face is 
not half so disfiguring as the traces of one night's 
orgie. Milton has made fiends interesting, and even 
murder and war may be woven into readable shape ; 
but there is no room in Milton's Pandemonium for so 
debased a form as the Demon of Alcohol — a form more 
sickening than the grizzly terror which guarded the 
portal of Hell! — Thomas Starr King. 

104.— 

V Drunk, your Honor," the officer said; 

" Drunk in the street, sir " — She raised her head. 

A lingering trace of the olden grace 

Still softened the lines of her woe-worn face; 

Unkempt and tangled her rich brown hair; 

Yet with all the furrows and stains of care — 

The years of anguish, and sin, and despair, 

The child of the city was passing fair. 

The ripe, red mouth with lips compressed, 

The rise and fall of the heaving breast, 

The taper fingers, so dimpled arid small, 

Crumple the fringe of the tattered shawl, 

As she stands in her place at the officer's call. 

She seems good and fair; seems tender and sweet — 

This fallen woman, found drunk in the street. 

Does the hand that once smoothed the ripple and wave 
Of that golden hair, lie still in its grave ? 
Are the lips that once pressed those red lips to their own. 
Dead to the pain of their smothered moan ? 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 115 

Has the voice that chimed with the lisping prayer, 
No accent of hope for the lost one there, 
Bearing her burden of shame and despair ? 

Drunk in the street — in the gutter found, 
From a passionate longing to crush and drown 
The soul of the woman she might have been; 
To throw off the weight of a fearful dream, 
And awake again in the home hard by — 
The wooded mountain that touched the sky, 
To pause awhile on the path to school, 
And catch in the depths of the limpid pool, 
Under the willow shade, green and cool — 
A dimpled face and a laughing eye, 
And the pleasant words of the passers by. 

Ye men with mothers, and sisters and wives, 

Have ye no care for these women's lives ? 

Must they starve for the comfort ye never speak ? 

Must they ever be sinful and erring and weak — 

Tottering onward with weary feet. 

Stained in the gutters and drunk in the street ? 

— Daniel O'Connell. 

105. The Vice of Smoking. — Of the three 
methods of using tobacco, that of smoking has insinu- 
ated itself most extensively among the youth of this 
country, and is the most hurtful use that can be made 
of the weed. Tobacco, employed in this way, being 
drawn in by the breath, conveys its poisonous influences 
to every part of the lungs. There the noxious fluid is 
absorbed in the minute spongy air cells, and has time 



116 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

to exert its pernicious influence on the blood — not 
vitalizing, but vitiating it. The blood imbibes the stimu- 
lant narcotic and circulates it through the whole system. 
It produces, in consequence, a febrile action in persons 
of delicate habits, where there is tendency to weakness 
and the tubercular deposit in the lungs. The debility 
of these organs, consequent on the use of tobacco, must 
favor these deposits, and thus the seeds of consumption 
are sown. This practice impairs the taste, lessens the 
appetite, and weakens the power of the stomach greatly. 
The prevalence of a craving thirst among smokers can 
be traced to its action on the lungs, because the nicotine 
is there, instead of in the stomach. The liquors that 
are drank do not alleviate the thirst, but rather asfofra- 
vate it. It is time medical testimony was turned to 
this point, and the great danger pointed out that 
threatens to make us a nation of Sybarites and pigmies. 
The use of tobacco disturbs the regular pulsation of the 
heart. Tobacco users are thus hourly in danger, and 
often suddenly fall dead. The habit weakens the m.ind, 
enfeebles the memory, paralyzes the will, produces 
morbid irritability, diseases the imagination, deadens 
the moral sensibilities, and is continually an assault and 
battery on the nervous system, the intellect and the 
so\x\.— Dr. R. H. McDonald. 



LABOR. 

106. If the world owes you a living, why does it 
not owe a living to every one ? And if to every one, 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 117 

by the sweat of whose brow should that Hving be made? 
The world owes no one a living. — A. S. Hallidic. 

107. Results die ; ao-encies are eternal. Merit 
lies not in possession, but in capability. In measuring 
a man, the wise ask not what has he, but what can he 
do ? If labor is not better than the reward, then life is 
a sad failure ; for, after a life time of labor, of all that 
we acquire, we can carry nothing with us out of the 

•world. — Httbcrt H. Bancroft. 

108. As nature's laws are immutable, and work 
is nature's law, the law of work is immutable. Philoso- 
phers talk of success and its conditions. Success has 
no condition but one, that is work. Honest, well- 
directed effort is as sure to succeed as the swelling 
rivulet is sure to find for itself a channel. Let the 
young man take heart, have patience, and persevere, 
laboring not as in the presence of a task-master, whom 
to defraud of time or faithfulness were a gain ; but 
remembering that every good deed is done for him- 
self, and makes him stronger, healthier, wiser, nobler, 
whether performed in the dark or in the broad light of 
open day. — H. H. Bancro/L 

109. Man's primal home was the abode of all 
loveliness. The heavens were his roof, and never was 
any so curiously ceiled and painted; the earth was his 
floor, and never was any so richly inlaid; the shadow 
of the trees was his retirement, under them were his 
dining rooms, and never were any so finely hung. The 
air was balmy and loaded with fragrance; there was no 



118 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

gloomy back-ground to the picture, and a long perspec- 
tive of coming happiness stretched before him. Here, 
amid this scene of beauty, aisled above and pillared 
about, he was to live, to love and labor. If our proto- 
parents, with the light of immortality streaming through 
every avenue of their souls, were called upon to labor, 
then we may rest assured the great Author of our being 
intended we should toil with our head, heart and hands. 
In the objective world we see a thousand things that 
prompt us to action. The grass grows ; the flowers' 
bloom; the oak expands; the rivers run; and the stars 
shine forever. In life, the pulsations of the heart never 
cease; and I have often thought man should draw a 
lesson of labor from this emblem of our energy. Id is 
the Creator's drum beat, the reveille, arousing mind 
and muscle to enter upon the march of life. — Rev. T. 
H. B. Ajiderson. 

110. The human mind once urged in activity is 
as nervous as the waters of the ocean. Like those 
waters, its purity and strength lie in constant motion. 
If it stagnates, rank smells arise and filthy animalculae 
swarm. It becomes an effervescing pool, breeding 
corruption and mental infusoria. The sole remedy to 
melancholy with intelligent persons is constant employ- 
ment of the mind. A big grief will sometimes dash upon 
the soul as a Switzer avalanche. It racks and tears it 
with its absorbing maofnitude and weisfht. Divert the 
mind by employment, and the stupendous grief melts 
away like that avalanche beneath a vernal sun. When 
a new fit of melancholy seizes you, betake yourself to 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 119 

labor and you will endow it with wings. It will fly- 
away. Jefferson and the elder Adams led tumultuous 
and earnest lives. They were immersed from child- 
hood in most arduous toil. They both died merry old 
men, because philosophical thought succeeded the throes 
of political labor. They baptized till their death in the 
font of continuous toil. The baptism dispelled the 
impurities of melancholy. Bonaparte, in his latter 
days, moped and mused in idleness. He died the 
most wretched of men. He should have written his 
life and not droned it into the dull ears of others. 
Benton was found busy when smote by the Great 
Reaper. Youth and prime struggle for a season of 
rest. It is the maddest of fallacies. The very struggle 
ingrains habits that, in pause, will produce misery and 
death. It is no wonder, in this view of the subject, 
that an affluent and unavaricious man pursues the game 
of accumulation until the undertaker bundles his old 
body into the cemetery. The fiend of melancholy 
would overtake him in a rustic villa and retirement. 
His repose and happiness are in labor. Every organ 
of his body is in fierce labor. Even in dream-land the 
mind, rudderless, toils away. — James G. Howai'd. 

111. Man, the individual, is in himself a force, 
an independent force; and the earth has just so manv 
forces as it numbers living, thinking, acting men; for 
even in this day of unexampled effort, many exist who 
do not live ; many are sentient who do not think ; many 
concern themselves with manifold affairs who do not 
act, Beforetime, men were thought for by their rulers, 



120 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and thus became mere agents of a despot's will; now, in 
the general heritage of independence, man has discerned 
his right, nay, his divine prerogative, of thinking for 
himself No longer moping in the thrall of tyranny, or 
reft of the free franchise of opinion, he has risen into 
the full stature of his manhood, realized the mas^ni- 
tude of his capacity, and in that knowledge verified the 
true nobility of labor; of labor in its highest form; the 
union of the physical and mental, labor of the sinewy 
arm, labor of the burnino; brain. He whose vocation 
is mechanical; is prompted to employ his hours of 
leisure in the cultivation of the mind; he whose pur- 
suits are mental, to invigorate his frame by frequent 
action. And thus while mind and body act, react upon 
each other with reciprocal intensity, man, the lord of 
creation, though "fallen from his high estate," without 
a fetter on his tireless wing, is rising higher, higher, in 
his flight towards the stars. — Joseph W. Wiiians. 

112. Until the horizon of our intelligence uplifts 
and opens into a clearer Beyond, let the Here and Now 
chiefly occupy our thoughts. 

Here and now, I say, then, it is in work itself, rather 
than in the accomplished result, that the true benefit of 
labor lies. We have been wrongly taught; nor is this 
the only instance wherein our teachers need instructing. 

Of all laws that environ us, and they are legion, not 
one is more palpable than that by the exercise of 
organs and faculties alone they develop. 

In this, science, philosophy, religion, and common 
sense agree. It is the pivot upon which all progress 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 121 

turns, the central principle alike in universal evolution 
and in individual development. Organs and organisms 
improve according to use. The blacksmith does not 
acquire strength to swing his hammer by running foot 
races; nor does the logician become proficient in subtle 
reasoning by counting money or selling bacon. Bind 
a limb, and it withers; put out one eye, and the other 
performs the work of two. Mind and muscle alike 
grow, improve, acquire strength and elasticity, only by 
exercise. Little is expected of the man who, in youth, 
was never sent to school, or required to work. So 
obvious is this that it is hardly worth discussing; and 
yet this fact proved, all is proved. — H. H. Bancroft. 

113. Before labor in itself ceases to be beneficial, 
the whole economy of nature must change. The 
inherent energy of man is significant of his laborious 
destiny. So nature groans under redundant energy, 
with here and there convulsive throes. Surrounding 
us is a universe seekinor rest. This seekins;' is the 
normal condition of affairs ; for rest only brings a 
desire for fresh activity. Bodies in motion labor to be 
quiet; bodies at rest labor to be in motion. So labor 
is the normal condition of man, both his will and his 
necessity. If he wills not to labor, necessity drives 
him to it; if necessity is absent, the spirit of good or 
the demon of evil stirs him to the accomplishment of 
he knows not what. Absolute rest once found, and 
chaos were come again. Activity is nature's rest, God's 
rest, and man's only rest. What is absolute repose but 
death } 



122 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

By work the universe Is, and man. Nature hinges 
on it; by it worlds are whirled and held in place, winds 
blow, and the fertilizing moisture is lifted from the 
ocean and dropped upon the hills; by it instinct is, and 
intellect is made, and soul implanted; by it grass grows,, 
flowers bloom, and the sunbeam enters my window, — • 
else how without work should it have come so far to 
greet me. 

If then to labor is nature's mandate, the reward 
being no less certain if I obey than the punishment is 
sure if I fail, what folly for me to look for a miracle in 
my behalf, and expect to reap the finest fruit of labor, 
which is improvement, not wealth, never having plowed 
nor planted ! — H. H. Bancroft. 



CONFLICT AS AN ELEMENT OF 
PROGRESS. 

114. Man is a fighting animal. About the first thing 
he does on coming into the world is to double up his fists 
and strike a belligerent attitude. He is never so happy 
as when harrying his weaker fellow, never so much at 
home as when in the arena of tumult. His history on 
earth is a little else than a record of strife and conten- 
tion, of violence and bloodshed. The first born of the 
race was a murderer; and his descendents, from that 
hour to this, have followed war as a business and peace 
as a pastime. Indeed there seems to be a law of con- 
flict runninor throuofh all nature. We read there was 
once a war in Heaven, when Lucifer, son of the morn- 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 123 

ing, organized a revolt against the Lord of Hosts. 
Everywhere, from the beginning of the world, the 
strong have preyed upon the weak — the powerful have 
crowded the feeble to the wall. The struggle for exist- 
ence, by which the strongest, if not the fittest, survives, 
is a permanent factor throughout all organic life. Agi- 
tation, tumult, the warring of repellant forces, the 
clashing of alien elements, the ferment of inharmo- 
nious constituents, these seem to be the order of 
nature, the spur and potency of progress. Thus has 
the world been builded; thus has man advanced from 
the primitive condition to his present exalted state. 
Every atom of living matter, from the flower at our feet 
to the farthest star that glitters in the heavens, obeys 
this primal law. This law prevails not only in the 
domain of action, but in the domain of ideas. Every 
thought that has thrilled the world, and set the pulses 
of men beating with joyous ecstasy, has met a counter- 
thought, opposing and warring against it — a counter- 
current of adverse opinion. Every scheme of progress^ 
every movement towards human advancement, every 
revolution in the direction of human culture, has been 
opposed by counter-forces, fought at every step by 
hostile principles, buffeted by the waves of adverse 
criticism ; and the more vital the principle, the more 
thorny its path of progress ; the more sacred the truth, 
the more persistent the opposing error. Yet v/hen the 
battle is ended — when the roar of the conflict is over, 
it is found that the truth has survived and the error 
perished. 

Conflict is not only a condition but a necessity of 



124 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

growth. It is the vital impulse that gives to growth 
its brawn and viofor. There can be no growth that is 
steady and lasting, no growth of strong and well-knit 
fiber without the stimulus of resistant forces. It is the 
fierce baptism of fire that gives to the steel blade its 
temper, its keen, biting edge, its spotless lustre. The 
storm that uproots the feebler children of the forest, 
calls out the latent vioror of the oak. The weak must 
perish, in order that the strong may have room to grow. 
The feeble must succumb in the great struggle, else by 
the fatal inheritance of weakness, life would degenerate, 
species perish, and the survival of the unfi.ttest ensue. 
Were the world perpetually at peace, the world would 
relapse to chaos. 

This is the method by which nature works largely, 
at least in the physical universe. The grim handiwork 
of conflict is visible all around us. Look at these 
majestic hills that bend so grandly, yet so lovingly, over 
this peaceful scene. What is the story they tell ? A 
story of war and tumult, of titanic forces meeting in 
the shock of elemental battle. Over their now verdant 
slopes, what fierce floods have swept — around their 
sunlight summits, what baleful fires have played! The 
earthquake and the volcano, the lava and the ice flow 
— the seething hell of internal fires — the remorseless 
glacier grinding and crashing its way to the sea — 
upheavals of primeval tufa — convulsions, cataclysms — - 
a wild derlirium of lawless forces struggling for ascend- 
ency. 

All this time nature knew just what she was about. 
She worked persistently toward a definite end, to the 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 125 

accomplishment of a definite result. She was prepar- 
ing the soil, tearing- up the old roots, blowing up the 
old stumps, burning up the old under-brush, destroying 
the rubbish of an effete and useless past that had served 
its day and done its work, in order to make room for a 
higher order of material and sentient existence. She 
struck the plowshare deep into the soil; she sent the 
axe crashing to the heart of the quivering tree; so that 
this new garden of the Lord should be so thoroughly 
tilled that all eyes would delight in its beauty, and all 
hearts be gladdened by its productiveness. And if the 
the heavens and the earth shook with the blows of the 
great husbandman, it was that golden harvests might 
crown these smiling slopes, that grass might grow and 
flowers bloom and broad spreading branches of trees 
give shelter to man and brute. 

I have no doubt that during this bit of garden mak- 
ing there was a good deal of unpleasant disturbance. 
The noise must have been peculiarly exasperating to 
the original inhabitants. The splinters and rocks must 
have been flying about in a manner intensely trying to 
weak nerves. There can be no question that many a 
rash Silurian citizen, that many an incautious plesiosaurus 
and too curious ichthyosaurus, who crawled out to see 
what the row v/as about, got badly hurt. Just as in 
our day, when there is lively work going on, the fossils 
who get in the way of the world's workers, come to 
grief. 

So in the moral world. The law of conflict moves 
through all the tortuous mazes of human history. 
There is no growth without upturning of the soil. 



126 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

The ground must be plowed and harrowed before the 
seed is sown. The wastes of nature must be reclaimed 
before fruitful harvests can bless the labor of the hus- 
bandman. Not only must the soil be prepared; but the 
refuse must be destroyed. The smoke and smutch 
may be disagreeable, may fill the air with noisome 
smells and dim .the brightness of the sun, but they 
must be endured. The wise tiller knows that the more 
thorough the burning up of the waste matter, the better 
for the ground and the richer the harvest. 

Regarded in this light, the drama of human events is 
no longer a chaos of incongruous incidents. It acquires 
unity, harmony, consistency — it moves with an almost 
rhythmic order. Every act and scene, every episode 
and incident, has a place and a purpose. What seem 
disorder, confusion, tumult, strife, are but manifestations 
of forces moving in the track of Law. They have their 
places ; they perform their part in the economy of 
nature. They are normal factors in the problem of 
human development. Instead of being hindrances, 
they are spurs to progress. Instead of retarding, they 
assist civilization. Sometimes they appear as symp- 
toms, giving warning of disease, indicating its nature 
and pointing to its seat. Sometimes they are active 
manifestations of growth— the riotous coursing of warm, 
rich blood through a healthful organism. Sometimes 
they act as checks on too rapid growth, repressing 
abnormal development — the engineer putting on the 
brakes to lessen the speed of the train. Sometimes, 
though rarely, they are merciful agents of destruction 
— destruction of what is unfit to live, of what should 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 127 

and must perish; the great gardener pulHng up the 
weeds in order that the thrifty plant may grow and the 
fragrant flower bloom. 

It is true, there are periods of apparent decay, 
periods when the world seemingly not only stops grow- 
ing, but goes back — the pendulum sweeping a revers- 
ing arc toward the black void of barbarism. Some- 
times an age, sometimes an era, is offerred up a sacri- 
fice on the altar of progress- — is made vicariously to 
suffer, that other and happier ages may grow and pros- 
per; but even here all is not lost. In the cataclysm of 
the Dark Ages, when civilization disappeared and the 
human intellect itself seemed to perish, all was not 
waste and ruin. Down in the gloom of those sunless 
centuries forces were silently at work; the seeds of a 
higher civilization were slowly germinating. If the 
earth refused the boon of fruit and flower, was it not 
because the soil, exhausted by the excesses of the past, 
was taking a rest ? 

Let it be understood that nothing that is worth sav- 
ing is wholly lost. Only the dross perishes, the pure 
gold shines with perennial lustre. From the wrecks of 
past systems, from the debris of dead powers and prin- 
cipalities, some germ of living truth, some grain of 
seed to fructify in other soils, is saved. The receding 
wave leaves some precious spoil on the strand. The 
Great Builder tears down, that he may build better. 
He demolishes the old rookeries to make room for re- 
gal structures. Ideas are indestructible as matter. A 
great thought never dies; once it has gone forth to the 
world, it moves on its shining way forever. It may 



128 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

seem to go out in darkness; it may disappear for ages;: 
but it comes back, like the dove to the ark, with bless- 
ings on its wings. — Samuel Williams, 

115. Lessons of the Hour. — 

There are a few sweet lessons that to me 

Have been as fruitful isles, and hights of palm 

To sailors shipwrecked on the foodless sea; 

Have been as midnight stars, as winds of balm, 

As songs of birds who know the skies are near; 
And these few leaves of hope I cluster here. 

First, Courage, for no grief a man may find 
But that some earlier one the same hath borne 

With quiet lips, tho' all his friends were blind. 

Thro' earth's laments, and laughters, tears and scorn. 

We, who now tread the floor of living days 

Must bear ourselves, nor heed men's blame nor praise. 

Next, Labor, Labor — on this pivot movt 

The endless forces of the living earth; 
Whatever thrills with strong desire and love 

The hearts of men; all deeds of deathless worth 
Were wrought by toilers — never man yet bent 

To a great task, and found his life misspent. 

Last, Faith, because so often we have found 

A breath of heaven in the fragfrant air, 

A Love unnamed, a pulse of crystal sound, \ 

A waking hope when all the days were fair, j 

A clearer sense of growth from less to more, \ 

A sound of waves along an unseen shore. :; 



THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 129 

Pause here to question — shall the men to come 
Have faith, and worship with a purer grace, 

And stronger than ourselves ? The years are dumb, 
And no clear answer falls from any place; 

We shape the future — but we hardly know 
With what result, for long doubts trouble so. 

Yet we hear voices, and new fervors creep 

Through all the soul from some unknown profound; 

A guerdon and a promise from the deep 
Whereof all future is ; it is the sound 

Of armies in the distance strong and calm. 

Making the darkness melt with their heroic psalm. 

It is the voice of men: we helpers here, 
Who shape the coming age as plastic clay, 

Know that a mystic light is creeping near. 

The sweet world, furrowed by the flame of day, 

Throbs into rosy gold, the night wears fast, 
And better men shall toil when we are past! 

Yea! these, the generations yet to be. 

Shall drop their plummets down the wrinkled walls 
Of dim abysses — sail the northern sea, — 

Read mystic languages in buried halls ; 
Or whisper through the lucid breath of stars 

In bright converse with Jupiter and Mars. 

— Charles H. Shinn, 



IV. 

RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 



PART IV. 

RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 



116. All Genius is Fragmentary. God is at 
once the perfect artist, the perfect poet, the perfect 
machinist, dramatist, morahst and sovereign — as deep 
and perfect in one as in another, and in each and all 
alike, infinitely accomplished. — -TJios. Starr King. 

117. Christianity, by asserting and emphasizing 
the intrinsic, inherent and immense value of evcjy soicly 
laid the foundation for the doctrine of Equal Rights. 

— Rev. IV. E. /jams. 

118. It has taken even Christians a long time to 
learn the real glory of their own faith. Each new 
creed has marked the progress of thought, and the final 
creed remains to be written. We have, after i8oo 
years, mastered only the Alphabet of Christianity. 

— Rev. IV. E. Ijams. 

119. Along all the line of ages, we see but one 
character who ever dared to tell all the truth of a sin- 
ning nation, and our ear catches, over the lapse of 
eighteen centuries, the cry that greeted his reforming 
voice — a nation's cry of "Crucify him!" — Edward 
Tompkins. 



132 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

120. People say to me, " but St. Patrick was a 
Catholic." What is that to me ? I only ask, what was 
his life ? I get behind all such narrowness. What did 
he accomplish for his race ? For my part, I look for- 
ward to beholdino- a (^rand Valhalla of the nations, in 
which I shall see — yonder, say Massillon; over there, 
John Bunyan, the Quaker; there, John Wesley; there, 
Blaise Pascal, a Jansenist priest; by his side, it may be, 
John Knox; and here, the Unitarian, Thomas Starr 
King. And yet, withal, I am a true Methodist. 

— J^ez>. Dr. Thos, Gtmrd. 

121. The belief in God is an inevitable part of 
our human nature; it is born with us, it is a universal 
belief; we cannot be brothers without having a com- 
mon father. However much a man may persuade him- 
self that he believes there is no God, when he is con- 
fronted with his own soul, he knows and feels that 
God exists. If there is no God to whom we owe our 
common origin, what relation can exist among men ? 

— John B. Felton. 

122. Emotional Religion. — Keep out of the so- 
ciety of sickly sentimentalists, and dreamy, morbid 
enthusiasts. Our friends ought to be people of good 
common sense, and honest and open moral principles. 
The religion of "Gush" is not the religion to carry us 
through any great crisis. Conscience, and not emo- 
tion, is what we require. — Rev. W. E. /jams. 

123. Decline of Orthodoxy. — The old ortho- 
doxy is virtually dead. You can still find it in books. 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 133 

It Still lives in printed creeds, but it has received 'so 
broad an interpretation as to be really a new thing 
under the sun. Not one minister in a thousand preaches 
the old creeds as they were preached. The preaching 
is better than the creed, and let us hope that, by and 
by, ministers will be honest enough to change their 
creeds, so that preaching and creed shall be in complete 
and even liberal harmony. — Rev. W. E. Ijains. 

124. Holiness the End of Human Life. — 
If holiness is the beauty and perfection of the 
Divine Nature, surely it is also the beauty and 
perfection of human nature. The whole work of man 
on this earth is to restore or perfect the Divine image 
in the nature of man — in the reason of man as truth, in 
the heart of man as love. Now, it is the harmonious 
combination of all these Divine features that constitutes 
the beauty of the Divine image, or holiness, in man. 
Holiness, therefore, is the true end of human life, and 
every other is false. — P'^^of. yos. LeConte. 

125. Foreknowledge of God. — Man, short-sighted 
and finite, changes or improves his original plan, from 
time to time, as unforseen contingencies arise. But God, 
foreseeing and foreknowing the end from the beginning, 
every possible contingency is included and provided for 
in the original conception. The whole idea of that 
infinite work of art which we call nature, is contained 
in the first strokes of the Great Artist's pencil, and the 
ceaseless activity of the Deity is employed through 
infinite time only in the unfolding of the original con- 
ception. Can we conceive anything which so nobly 



134 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

illustrates the all-comjDrehensive fore-knowledge and 
the immutability of the Deity ? — Prof. Joseph LeConte. 

126. The Inner Life. — So many of us there are 
who have no majestic landscapes for the heart — no 
gardens in the inner life ! We live on the flats, in a 
country which is dry, droughty, barren. We look up 
to no hights whence shadows fall and streams flow, 
singing. We have no great hopes. We have no sense 
of infinite guard and care. We have no sacred and 
cleansing fears. We have no consciousness of Divine, 
All-enfolding Love. We may make an outward visit 
to the Sierras, but there are no Yosemites in the soul. 

— Thos. Starr King. 

127. The Words of Christ. — ■ History, until of 
late, has been mostly a record of battles, many of which 
had no effect upon society. But history, truly written, 
will show that the hinge-epoch of centuries was when 
no battle- sound was heard on the earth — when in Gali- 
lee one was uttering sentiments in a language now 
nowhere spoken, never deigning to write a line, but 
entrustmg to the air his words. The Caesar whose 
servant ordained the crucifixion — all the Caesars — are 
dust; but His words live yet, the substantial agents of 
civilization, the pillars of our welfare, the hope of the 
race. — Thomas Starr Kins'. 



"^ 



128. The Church Essential to the Nation. — 
The true life of a nation is moral. The church is set 
as the spring of that life. To her it is left to promulgate 
the doctrines from which moral apprehensions arise and 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 135 

moral principles are evolved. She is commissioned to 
hold aloft true standards, and radiate the light of swift 
and strong rebuke upon sin in low and high places. 
While the church lives the nation cannot die. The 
light of the "city set on a hill" cannot be hidden or ob- 
scured from without; it must decline and darken from 
within. A perversion of religion must both precede 
and accompany every devastating overflow of de- 
pravity. — Rev. M. C. Briggs. 



IMMORTALITY. 

129. The mysteries of the other world are not re- 
vealed. The principles of judgment, the tests of ac- 
ceptance, and of the supreme eminence, are unfolded. 
Intellect, genius, knowledge, shall be as nothing be- 
fore humility, sacrifice, charity. But in the uses of 
charity, the fiery tongue, the furnished mind, the un- 
quailing heart shall have ample opportunities, and 
ampler than here. Paul goes to an immense service 
still, as an Apostle; Newton, to reflect from grander 
heavens a vaster light. — TJios. Starr King. 

130. The soul is not a shadow; the body is. 
Genius is not a shadow; it is a substance. Patriotism 
is not a shadow, it is light. Great purposes, and the 
spirit that counts death nothing in contrast with honor 
and the welfare of our country — these are the witnesses 
that man is not a passing vapor, but an immortal spirit. 

— Tlios. Starr Kins'. 



136 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

131. The yearning for a future life is natural 
and deep. It grows with intellectual growth, and perhaps 
none really feel it more than those who have begun to 
see how ereat is the universe, and how infinite are the 
vistas which every advance in knowledge opens before 
us — vistas which would require nothing short of eter- 
nity to explore. But in the mental atmosphere of our 
times, to the great majority of men on whom mere 
creeds have lost their hold, it seems impossible to look 
on this yearning save as a vain and childish hope, aris- 
ing from man's egotism, and for which there is not the 
slightest ground or warrant, but which, on the contrary, 
seems inconsistent with positive knowledge. 

Now, when we come to analyze and trace up the 
ideas that thus destroy the hope of a future life, we 
shall find them, I think, to have their source, not in any 
revelations of physical science, but in certain teachings 
of political and moral science which have deeply per- 
meated thought in all directions. They have their root 
in the doctrines that there is a tendency to the produc- 
tion of more human beings than can be provided for ; 
that vice and misery are the result of natural laws; and 
the means by which advance goes on; and that human 
progress is by a slow race development. These doc- 
trines, which have been generally accepted as approved 
truth, do what the extensions of physical science do 
not do — they reduce the individual to insignificance; 
they destroy the idea that there can be in the ordering 
of the universe any regard for his existence, or any 
recognition of what we call moral qualities. It is diffi- 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 137 

cult to reconcile the idea of human immortality with 
the idea that nature wastes men by constantly bringing 
them into beinof where there is no room for them 
It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an intelligent 
and beneficent Creator with the belief that the 
wretchedness and degradation, which are the lot of 
such a large proportion of human kind, result from 
his enactments; while the idea that man, mentally and 
physically, is the result of slow modifications perpetu- 
ated by heredity, irresistibly suggests the idea that it 
is the race life, not the individual life, which is the object 
of human existence. Thus has vanished, with many 
of us, and is still vanishing with more of us, that belief 
which in the battles and ills of life, affords the strongest 
support and deepest consolation. 

Population does not tend to outrun subsistence; the 
waste of human powers and the prodigality of human 
suffering do not spring from natural laws, but from the 
iofnorance and selfishness of men in refusing: to conform 
to natural laws. Human progress is not by altering 
the nature of men, but, on the contrary, the nature of 
men seems, generally speaking, always the same. 

— Henry George. 

182. The idea of development involves the idea 
of maturity, and this, that of decay ; in other words, it 
involves the idea of cyclical movement; there is no 
such thing as stability in things material. The uni- 
verse itself is passing through its cycle of changes 
which must finally close; the universe itself is en- 
wrapped within the complex coils of a law which must 
eventually strangle it to death. 



138 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Thus the cycle of the individual closes in death, but 
the race progresses; the cycle of the race closes in 
death, but the earth abides; the cycle of the earth 
closes, but the universe remains; finally the cycle of 
the universe itself must close. The law is absolutely 
universal among things material. Where, then, shall 
we look for true, rectilinear, ever-onward progress.'* 
Where, but in that world where the soaring spirit of 
man is freed from the trammels of material laws — the 
world of immortal spirits. — Prof. Jos. LeCo7ite. 

133.— 

In thought, in feeling, and in love. 
Things do not perish, though they pass; 
The form is shattered to the eye, 
But only broken is the glass. 

Sun, friend, and flower have each become 
A part of my immortal part; 
They are not lost, but evermore 
Shine, live and bloom within my heart. 

— W. A. Kendall. 



134. Infinity. — Physical causes have entirely con- 
cealed three-sevenths of the moon from our observa- 
tion. And this must always remain so under existing 
cosmical arrangements. No conceivable progress in 
astronomy — no possible improvement in the telescope 
can remove or abate the difficulty. It is true that it is 
very seldom that we find the limits of human knowledge 
so sharply defined, as in the case of the physical aspect 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. * 139 

of our planetary companion. Nevertheless, nearly simi- 
lar conditions exist in the intellectual world, where, in 
the domain of deep research into the mysteries and the 
primeval creative forces of Nature, there are regions 
similarly turned away from us and apparently forever 
unattainable. So likewise, in those systems of double 
stars, which the astronomer finds scattered through the 
awful abysses of space; how remote the analogies to 
our system ! What complex reactions must exist be- 
tween the planets engirdling the double suns and 
their duplex centres of power and energy ! But their 
features are forever hidden from man; we can never 
hope to explore those sacred mysteries. It seems to 
me that no one need regret that there are some enclosed 
spots, some secluded regions, some quietudes in creation, 
which will be unexplored and unpenetrated forever. 
These are the resfions in the intellectual world into 
which faintness, weariness, and broken-heartedness may 
sometimes flee, and find shelter and repose! Sweet 
and inviting mysteries — encouraging mysteries — among 
whose gentle shadows all our holy aspirations, our 
unnamed yearnings, humbly and tremblingly advance, 
and find or fashion for themselves images of purity and 
love — convictions of immortality — vistas of a life to 
come ! — P^vf. Jos. LeConte. 

135. One All-Pervading Principle. — The Ionic 
philosophers saw only one all-pervading principle in 
nature, though personified in the minds of some by one 
element and in the minds of others by another. Thus, 
Thales thought it water, Anaxagoras atoms, Anaximenes 



140 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

air, Heraclitus fire. But whatever it is, science and 
rehVion see, feel it, and believe in the same thinsf, 
though they call it by different names and numberless 
sub-names. We feel God in nature and in ourselves 
as the blind child, feeling with its fingers the lineaments 
of the face it loves, reads thus the secrets of the heart 
behind it. — Hubert H. Bancroft. 

136. Faith.^ — Happily, for all things beyond the 
selfishness of the day, the heart is stronger than the 
head. No nation has accomplished a high destiny 
without a belief in something' better and his/her than 
itself Faith is the parent of aspiration. We have 
a high destiny before us; let us have faith in it; and 
faith in the Hi!:^her Power which beckons us towards 
its accomplishment. 

Years ago, maternal hands led us to the modest 
church which gently crowns the village green; or by 
our mother's side we knelt within the dim aisles of the 
cathedral, which was all lighted up, for us, by the glory 
of the Madonna and the smile of the infant Jesus. 
There we heard those sublime words, the crown of the 
wisdom of Socrates and of the philosophy of Plato, 
towards which all good men haci groped before, and 
which all good men have followed since: "Do unto 
others as ye would that they should do unto you." 
We have been taught the life-giving principles, which 
are the (jerm of the reliofion of the church in all acres 
— of the religion of England, of the religion of our 
fathers, the religion of good deeds and noble sacrifices; 
we have our faith ; we will abide by it, and the gates of 
hell shall not prevail against it. — T. W. Frcelon. 



I 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 141 

137. O, Affection, Forgiveness, Faith ! — Ye are 
mighty spirits, ye are powerful angels. And the soul 
that in its dying moments trusts to thee, cannot be far 
from the gates of heaven, whatever the past life may 
have been. However passion or excitement may have 
led it astray, if at the last and final hour it returns to 
the lessons of a mother's love, of a father's care — if it 
leiirns the fjreat lesson of foro[-iveness to its enemies — 
if at the last moment it can utter these words: "Father 
of light, and life, and love!" these shall be winged 
angels — troops of blessed spirits — that will bear the 
fainting, wounded soul to the blessed abodes, and for- 
ever guard it against despair. Oh, my friends ! those 
mighty gates, built by the Almighty to guard the 
entrance to the unseen world, will not open at the 
battle-axe of the conqueror; they will not roll back if 
all the artillery of earth were to thunder forth a demand, 
which, indeed, would be lost in the infinite regions of 
eternal space ! but they will open with thoughts of 
affection, with forgiveness of injuries, and with prayer. 

— Ge7i. E. D. Baker. 



138. Atheism. — The clinching argument against 
atheism is not that there is such constant order in the 
universe, but that so many facts, apparently independ- 
ent of order, play so beautifully Into each other in per- 
fect harmony. Can it be chance that determines the 
mad but punctual whirling of the universe ? Think of 
a heap of letters dropped from space, sent fluttering 



142 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

through the air, Hke snow-flakes, and by chance arrang- 
ing themselves into the scenes, the stirring passages, 
the solemn climax of the tragedy of Macbeth, so that 
all the characters should be there ! The proposition 
obliges atheism and probability to look each other in 
the face. If Macbeth is probable as a result of such a 
shower of letters, hurled down by chance, then it may 
be confessed that chance hurled the immense physical 
alphabet into this grand poem of nature, whose leaves 
are systems and each word a world. — TJios. Starr King. 



139. Religion Native to the Heart. — Religious 
sentiments are native to the heart of man. They dwell 
in the heart of the savage, they illuminate the under- 
standing of the sage, they radiate amid the haunts of 
civilization and refinement. Human nature, after grop- 
ing for a season in the darkness of its fall, began to 
trace, amid the aspirations and sublime conceptions of 
its inner thought, the glimmer of a light divine. Un- 
satisfied longings, restless strivings after some far-off 
good, soon taught the soul, through the demonstrations 
of its inward promptings, that its essence was immortal. 
What the acute investigations of reason, aided by the 
deep study of the page of nature, imparted to the con- 
templations of philosophy, the light of revelation finally 
made clear. Socrates beheld, and imparted to his 
acolytes, the sureties of an immortal life and the in- 
finite being of a God. Cicero had bright conceptions 
of an existence, Morious and unending, in another 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 143 

world. These minds, and multitudes of others, soared 
beyond the vain tenets of the day, which frittered away, 
in a multitude of deified attributes, all just ideas of a 
God, and their piercing flight ceased not till it pene- 
trated to the lofty realms of truth. In all periods of the 
world's history, there have been painful spectacles of 
free opinion, but they have proved exceptions to the 
spirit of the age. They stand as stands a charred and 
lightening-blasted oak, among the stalwart giants of the 
forest. Even in the midst of the dark ages, the spirit 
of religion still survived. Wherever Romanism was 
rejected, a Theurgical system took its place, which 
linked the mind of man to the mysteries of a world 
unseen, and his spirit to the worship of Divinity. 

— yos. W. IVinans. 

140. Man's Mission.— Franklin, when he inter- 
rogated the thunder-cloud, and received in response a 
shock from the key, an assurance of its relationship to 
electricity, designed not to change, but to imdcrstaiid, 
the laws that control this element of terror that had 
been regarded as God's avenging messenger. This 
knowledge enabled him to construct lightning-rods to 
protect buildings from its damaging presence. By 
studying the laws of this ever present but unseen 
agent, Morse was enabled to subordinate it to the 
noblest purposes. May not the study of the soul's 
origin, its capacity and destiny, from a scientific stand- 
point, reveal to us knowledge that may be applied for 
our own benefit and to the advancement of our race .-* 
There may be laws too occult for our understanding. 



i '4 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

but there are none so sacred as to forbid our desire for 
their comprehension. This immense domain for human 
exploration, for the present and for the eternal future, 
demonstrates the grandeur of man's character and 
mission; and the great minds which occasionally roll up 
between the centuries and flash their light like meteors 
in the sky, are an earnest of man's capacities, and the 
future possibilities of all. Copernicus, Socrates, Plato, 
Galileo, Newton, Locke, Melancthon, Edwards, La 
Place, Bowditch, Leverrier and others, are historical 
monuments, not only for our admiration, but our imita- 
tion. It is a glorious as well as a consoling thought, 
that every person born into this world, is in the posses- 
ion of the germs of the undeveloped faculties, which 
may. at some period in the vast future, transcend in its 
attainments, these great lights of the world ; like an 
inverted pyramid, spreading outward and upward in its 
lofty and expansive growth, taking hold on knowledge, 
that carries it, as it were, into the realms of the infinite. 
What man has accomplished, it may be possible for all 
men to acquire. This opens to us the beauty and 
glory of that life and future into which we all are soon 
to enter, when to know and to love shall constitutue 
the two orreat forces that are to move us onward and 
upward, into the empire of wisdom and the realms of 
eternal bliss. — Gen. John A. Collins. 

141. The Golden Age to Come. — It is a 
oflorious three-fold truth: That over us and over all 
things there exists a benignant mind; that he presides 
over all the commotions and revolutions of history; and 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 145 

that he has an increasinq; kinfjdom, which he is evolving 
out of the very evils of the present, as a lily springs, 
white and beautiful, out of the quagmire. Christianity 
invites us to a wide survey. Its visions and vistas are 
not those of an hour, or a day or a century, but rather 
those of immeasurable ages. God is in no hurry — He 
rests not, hastes not. He employed untold ages to 
complete the solid earth we now inhabit, and he may 
employ even a longer period to carry to its final stages 
the grander process of the moral world. The mythol- 
ogy of Greece and Rome placed the Golden Age back 
in the distant past. Christianity, on the other hand, 
places the Golden Age forward in a distant future. 
Their religion was a bright memory, ours a glorious 
hope. — Rev. W. E. Ijams. 

142. The Sceptic — Ancient and Modern. — The 
ancient skeptic or philosopher, in assailing dogmas and 
destroying systems, had (at least in his best judgment 
believed he had) higher ethics and purer systems to 
offer in their place; while our modern sceptic, in his 
rage for novelty, affectation of learning, and monstrous 
lust of destruction, brutally impugns the existing order 
of things — long established standards of right, our 
present system of religion and morality, dismantling it 
of all its holy traditions, ridiculing its struggles, dispa- 
raging its triumphs, and consigning to puerility the 
reverence which centuries have paid it; and when his 
devilish work is done, when with sacrilegious wanton- 
ness he has scattered our sacred treasures to the four 
winds of heaven, ignored principles which mighty 



146 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

minds established, and destroyed the chart by which 
the good men of hundreds of generations have traveled 
on happy and contented in their journey to God, — I 
say, when all this work of destruction is complete; 
when this deadly conspiracy against humanity is fully 
accomplished; and man's reason, in its hour of grievous 
unrest, asks the sceptic for something outside of self and 
its possibilities, upon which it can depend for reference, 
guidance and instruction ; when man's heart, with 
jDlaintive prayer, asks for something to love, something 
to cling to, some source of consolation in this disap- 
pointing world, some hope in the bitterness of death, 
the sceptic's hands are empty, his heart is cold, his 
voice is silent; having robbed us of our birth-rio-ht, in 
which all these blessings were comprehended, he gives 
us what he calls a "liberated manhood," what we know 
to be an incarnate malediction, an existence without an 
object, adversity without a remedy, a grave without a 
hope, a death which means annihilation. — Dr. J. 
Campbell SJiorb. 



143. True Religion Welcomes Truth. — The 
theory that the Bible is an infallible record has wrought 
incalculable disaster both to science and religion, and 
is the secret of the alienation between them. Why 
not, then, admit that a man may be inspired as to 
spiritual truth, and yet be ignorant as to scientific truth } 
If religious people would only be reasonable, there 
would be no more conflict between science and religion. 
What is religion ? Is it not the supreme love of God, 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 147 

and the unselfish love of my neighbor ? Religion, 
loaded with the traditions of mythology, the errors of 
Hebrew poesy, or the imperfections growing out of the 
human element of inspiration, will terminate in the de- 
feat of faith and the triumph of philosophy. Man is 
naturally a religious being. The instinct of faith in 
God is a real one. Man is not man without reliirion. 
Ministers of the gospel should not be afraid of science. 
Chemistry should be in alliance with all truth; and we 
should be ready to surrender any dogma, however dear, 
at the bidding of any real truth, come whence it may. 

— Rev. W. E. Ijams. 

144. The Spiritual Feeling. — Let a man once 
realize the full sense of the truth that he is a spirit, and 
he will begin to act like an immortal child of an Infinite 
Father. Let him feel that this earth is only a nursery 
of souls, that here he learns the mere alphabet of God's 
great volume of everlasting truth, that this is merely a 
short space in his whole career, and he will begin to 
rise out of the filth, how deeply soever he may be sunk 
in it; he will begin to stir himself, he will begin to lift 
his head up among the stars, he will begin to open his 
bosom to the inspiring music of the heavens, and to 
realize his affinity with all that is beautiful, glorious and 
divine. We will no longer build our religious temples 
of philosophy out of the old debris of the dead centu- 
ries; we will build them out of the blocks of solid light 
which science has quarried out of the eternal deeps of 
n.iture. We will build their crystal walls of the pure, 
transparent and dazzling beams drawn from nature's 



148 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

entire compass. They shall go up grandly, until the 
domes shall pierce the heavens, and all mankind wor- 
ship around their altars — sacred to the rights, liberties 
and progress of all. We will have no spiritual hier- 
archy, but inspired men and women shall receive their 
commissions from the Genius of Nature; and we will 
have for a ritual the repetition of the order and har- 
mony and beauty that print themselves in letters of 
blazing light on the face of the midnight sky. We will 
have for members all humanity that carries in its bosom 
faith and hope, and would fain get rid, some day, of this 
encompassing and cramping flesh which, when we are 
once fairly out of it, will enable us all the more to en- 
joy the freedom of the spiritual republic in Heaven. 
All the truths of the past are ours; science is their 
handmaiden; it teaches the tender sympathies of the 
soul to blossom with more than their usual freedom 
and beauty; it has a smile for the faithful, encourage- 
ment for the disappointed, inspiration for the dull, and 
hope for all mankind. — Sclden J. Finney. 



THE CORRUPTING INFLUENCE OF 
REVIVALS. 

145. I. Revival METHODS ARE RADICALLY VICIOUS. 

— The speeches and prayers, limited to three minutes, 
and stopped by a tinkle of the conductor's bell; the 
reading of piles of notes for the conversion of indicated 
persons, and the offering of supplication for them, as 
though prayer were a method of sacred sorcery; the 
asking of young persons if they "know the Lord;" the 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 149 

solicitation of people to publish their most sacred feel- 
ings of penitence, or their equally sacred glooms and 
distrusts and scepticism, the flitting about of experts in 
the system of evangelical pathology — if one can contem- 
plate such methods of dealing with the religious 
nature, in a season of excitement, without feeling that 
permanent harm must result to those who conduct the 
system and those who are the victims of it, he must 
hold a conception of religion and religious sensibilities 
that needs, I think, to be enlarged and refined. Safety 
is still the word and motive that is executed with all 
possible modulations and variations in the whole fan- 
tasia of praying, note-reading, and appeal. "Come to 
Christ;" "get an interest in Christ;" "fly to the cross;" 
"find the Saviour;" "delay is dangerous, for death 
may overtake you to-morrow;" — these are the char- 
acteristic calls and warnings of the movement. 

This shows its radical vice. Its working-force, so 
far as the instruction and the teachers give it character, 
is not the glory of truth, the beauty of holiness, the 
need of human nature, for its health, to begin to serve 
God and be educated in a spiritual estimate of all nature 
and all life. The long arm of its lever is selfish fear. 
Its fulcrum is the death-bed. Its airrt is the swinging 
of men, from the edge of the grave, over the abyss, 
into a mechanical heaven. 

II. Revivals poison manhood. — I cannot do any 
thing else than say that this is poison. The religious emo- 
tion that goes to the meetings may be pure and hope- 
ful. But when it is met by this kind of instruction, or 



150 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

is Stimulated thus to more intense vitality, a bane is 
taken into the spiritual blood that I believe almost 
neutralizes the good effect of a renunciation of open 
sins. Just to the extent that this doctrineJs absorbed 
into character, the manhood is injured. The person 
may not be a gross offender, as before, against the 
commandments, he may be a frequenter of prayer- 
meetings, and a sincere exhorter to flee from the wrath 
to come, but he is converted to be stunted ; he is 
innoculated with a virus that chills and shrivels his 
humanity; he is turned from a careless and perhaps 
generous-hearted sinner, into a miserable, starveling 
dwarf of the spiritual order, on the side of the Lord. 

III. Revivals corrupt youth. — Not long ago I 
read a volume containing twenty-five sermons, recently 
preached in New York and Brooklyn with reference to 
the revival, by the most distinguished and cultivated 
ministers of those cities. Some of the most powerful 
of the discourses, I read in my library till past mid- 
night. The air at last seemed full of infernal terrors 
and woe, and I shut the dreadful book. In a room up 
stairs, my little daughter, six years old, was sleeping, 
with whom I have often the most sweet conversation 
upon God and Christ, and the life hereafter. 

But I said to myself then, in excitement of soul, 
what I will say here with seriousness and deliberation, 
that rather than my child should have the awful the- 
ology of the average of that book stamped upon her 
heart, I should unspeakably prefer that she should grow 
up an atheist. As an atheist, the best currents of 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 151 

human nature would not be corrupted in her. Believ- 
iuLT what that book teaches, and havins: her whole 
nature cramped and distorted into its mould, it would 
not be possible that her spirit could have any religious 
beauty, cheer, or peace. 

IV. Revivals dishonor the deity. — A large num- 
ber of men and women, no doubt, do reject most of 
this venom. They are sound and noble in spite of their 
theology. Their spiritual sense is instinctively so deli- 
cate and healthy, that this leaven of Satan in the bread 
of life offered to them, is quietly cast out before it can 
pass into their moral blood. But the majority take it 
into their constitution. It becomes their wisdom, their 
motive, their measure of God's character. And then 
what can they know of the Infinite Perfectness ? Be- 
lieving that God has appointed a terrible and irreversible 
fmal doom, that yawns just beyond the sepulchre, for 
every man that has misused the opportunities of this 
life; that he will never pity or forgive any spirit he has 
made, on the most thorough repentance, through eter- 
nity — what can they know, under such instruction, of 
that perfectness of God which is more than the sum of 
all the holy and lovely qualities of human character on 
earth ? 

Make God just as good in eternity as he is in time. 
Put religion on its natural basis, and you kill the revi- 
vals, you shrivel the inquiry-meetings. 

V. Revivals repel from religion the young life 

AND THE BEST INTELLECT OK THE LAND. — -Let any man 

go through the West, and talk with the men who repre- 



152 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

sent the energy and future of the great rising States; 
let him hear their lamentations over thp dreariness and 
huskiness of the theology that is poured from the 
pulpits, their confessions of the inward rebellion and 
loathing which, when they go to church, they listen to 
its effete traditions, its ghastly philosophy of life, its 
artificial terrors, its theories of the government of the 
moral world, so discordant with the simplicity of science, 
so foreign from the clearest insiofht which our best 
literature reveals; let him hear them utter their fears 
for the effect on society, after two generations more of 
this dismal parody of a gospel, and ask if some nobler 
administration of truth cannot be inaugurated soon and 
widely. 

The awakening in this country by which hopes will 
be re-animated, and fresh light poured into the popular 
heart, will flow from the silent stealing of new truth 
into our theology. We want such an access of truth 
that the general mind can be fed with a worthier con- 
ception of God, that will make every thought of him 
inspiring as the dawn of the morning, and will banish 
the superstition that this life is the final state of proba- 
tion, as an insult to his plan of eternal education, and 
a chimera of a barbarous age. — Thomas Star)" King. 



THIS LIFE THE AVENUE TO ANOTHER. 

146. Political Economy has been called the dismal 
science, and, as currently taught, is hopeless and de- 
spairing. But this is solely because she has been 
shackled and degraded; her truths dislocated; her 



RELIGIOX AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 153 

harmonics iofnored; the words she would utter oracfSfed 
in her mouth, and her protest against wrong turned into 
an endorsement of injustice. Freed in her own proper 
symmetry, PoHtical Economy is radiant with hope. 
Properly understood, the laws which govern the pro- 
duction and distribution of wealth show that the want 
and injustice of the present social state are not neces- 
sary; but that, on the contrary, a social state is possible 
in which poverty would be unknown, and all the better . 
qualities and higher powers of human nature would 
have opportunity for full development. Further than 
this, when we see that social development is governed 
neither by a Special Providence nor by a merciless fate, 
but by law, at once unchangeable and beneficent; when 
we see that human will is the great factor, and that, 
taking men in the aggregate, their condition is as they 
make it; when we see that economic law and moral 
law are essentially one, and that the truth which the 
intellect grasps after toilsome effort, is but that which 
the moral sense reaches by a quick intuition, a flood of 
light breaks in upon the problem of individual life. 
These countless millions like ourselves, who, on this 
earth of ours have passed and still are passing, with 
their joys and sorrows, their toil and their striving, 
their aspirations and their fears, their strong percep- 
tions of things deeper than sense, their common feelings 
which form the basis even of the most divergent creeds 
— their little lives do not seem so much like meaning- 
less waste. 

The great fact which Science in all her branches 
shows is the universality of law. Wherever he can 



154 CALIFORNIA ANTHOOLGY. 

trace it, whether in the fall of an apple or in the revo- 
lution of binary suns, the astronomer sees the working 
of the same law, which operates in the minutest divi- 
sions in which we may distinguish space, as it does in 
the immeasurable distances with which his science deals. 
Out of that which lies beyond his telescope comes a 
moving body, and again it disappears. So far as he 
can trace its course the law is ignored. Does he say 
that this is an exception ? On the contrary, he says 
that this is merely a part of its orbit that he has seen ; 
that beyond the reach of his telescope the law holds 
good. He makes his calculations, and after centuries 
they are proved. 

Now, if we trace out the laws which govern human 
life in society, we find that in the largest as in the 
smallest community they are the same. We find that 
what seem at first sight like divergences and exceptions, 
are but manifestations of the same principles. And 
we find that everywhere we can trace it, the social law 
runs into and conforms with the moral law; that in the 
life of a community, justice infallibly brings its reward, 
and injustice its punishment. But this we cannot see 
in individual life. If we look merely at individual life, 
we cannot see that the laws of the universe have the 
slightest relation to good or bad, to right or wrong, to 
just or unjust. Shall we then say that the law which is 
manifest in social life is not true of individual life '^ It 
is not scientific to say so. We would not say so in 
reference to anything else. Shall we not rather say 
this simply proves that we do not see the whole of 
individual life ? 



RELIGION AND THE FUTURE LIFE. 155 

The laws which Political Economy discovers, like 
the facts and relations of physical nature, harmonize 
with what seems to be the law of mental development 
— not a necessary and involuntary progress, but a pro- 
gress in which the human will is an initiatory force. 
But in life, as we are cognizant of it, mental develop- 
ment can go but a little ways. The mind hardly begins 
to awake ere the bodily powers ciecline — it but becomes 
dimly conscious of the vast fields before it, but begins 
to learn and to use its streno^th — to recognize relations 
and extend its sympathies — when, with the death of 
the body, it passes away. Unless there is something 
more, there seems here a break, a failure. Whether 
it be a Humboldt or a Herschel, a Moses who looks 
from Pisgah, a Joshua who leads the host, or one of 
those sweet and patient souls who in narrow circles live 
radiant lives, there seems, if mind and character here 
developed can go no further, a purposelessness incon- 
sistent with what we can see of the linked sequence of 
the universe. 

By a fundamental law of our minds — the law, in fact, 
upon which Political Economy relies in all her deduc- 
tions — we cannot conceive of a means without an end, 
a contrivance without an object. Now, to all nature, 
so far as we come in contact with it in this world, the 
support and employment of the intelligence that is in 
man furnishes such an end and object. But unless man 
himself may rise to or bring forth something higher, 
his existence is unintellifjible. So stronof is this meta- 
physical necessity, that those who deny to the individ- 
ual anything more than this life, are compelled to trans- 



156 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

fer the idea of perfectibility to the race. But there is 
nothing whatever to show any essential race improve- 
ment. Human progress is not the improvement of 
human nature. The advances in which civilization 
consists are not secured in the constitution of man, but 
in the constitution of society. They are thus not fixed 
and permanent, but may at any time be lost, nay, are 
constantly tending to be lost. And further than this, 
if human life does not continue beyond what we see of 
it here, then we are confronted, with regard to the race, 
with the same difficulty as with the individual. For it 
is as certain that the race must die as it is that the in- 
dividual must die. We know that there have been 
geologic conditions under which human life was im- 
possible on this earth. We know that they must re- 
turn again. Even now, as the earth circles on her ap- 
pointed orbit, the northern ice-cap slowly thickens, and 
the time gradually approaches when glaciers will flow 
again, and austral seas, sweeping northward, bury the 
seats of present civilization under ocean wastes, as, it 
may be, they now bury what was once as high a civili- 
zation as our own. And beyond these periods, science 
discerns a dead earth, an exhausted sun — a time when, 
clashing together, the solar system shall resolve itself 
into a gaseous form, again to begin immeasurable mu- 
tations. 

What, then, is the meaning of life — of life absolutely 
and inevitably bounded by death } To me it only seems 
intelligible as the avenue and vestibule to another life. 

— Henjy George. 



V. 

THE FARM AND GARDEN. 



PART V. 

THE FARM AND GARDEN, 



147. The intellect must be plowed deeper than 
the furrows of the field, or the farmer is a mere serf of 
the soil — a superior kind of dray-horse — a kind of 
clown, but without his suppleness of wit or limb. 

— Saimiel B. BelL 

148. The farmer that pays his debts can't get 
rich dishonestly, in the sight of heaven. There can't 
be too much wheat, too many noble cattle, too much 
wool, an excess of excellent peaches and pears, too 
many pumpkins, or even too great a crowd of cabbages^ 
if they are not eaten so immoderately as to come to a 
head acjain on human shoulders. — Thos. Starr Kiiis^. 

149. The first man, being historically and tra- 
ditionally perfect, had a garden as his noblest allotment 
The farther the race drifts away from the cultivation of 
the soil, the nearer it gets to barbarism. The Apache 
is not a good horticulturalist, and therefore there is no 
gentlen(iss in his blood. Teach him to love and culti- 
vate a garden, and he is no longer a savage. The best 
thought and the best inspiration may come to one when 
all the gentle ministries of his garden wait upon him; 



158 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

when the soul of things is concurrent with his own; and 
bee and almond-blossom, the rose, and the smallest 
song-sparrow in the tree-top, are revelators and in- 
structors. — IV. C. Bartlctt. 

150. Economy in Agriculture. — The Creator, 
who gave the globe to Adam, with the command to dress 
and keep it, has connected economy with its fertility. 
Economy lies at the base of high and permanent civili- 
zation. Where a river rises every year, overflows its 
banks, and renews the elements which the land has ex- 
pended into crops, men are absolved from the duty and 
need of caring for the soil. God takes the capital unto 
his own keeping, and notifies man that he will prevent 
its waste. . But where this is not done, men arc notified 
just as plainly that they must repair the capital and pre- 
serve it at a point where the returns will be generous 
and perpetual. The interests of the human race re- 
pose on agriculture, and agriculture reposes on this 
law. To fulfill it, requires immense knowledge, and a 
reverent and persistent thrift. The farmer that under- 
stands it, and acts upon it, stands at the head of all 
workers on the planet. — Thos. Starr King. 

151. Agriculture Stimulates Patriotism. — As 
the roots of a tree derive their nourishment, so the 
foundations of society derive their strength from the 
culture of the soil. It was her devotion to agricultural 
pursuits that rendered Poland so glorious in her strug- 
gle against tyranny — so deeply imbued with the spirit 
of freedom that the whole civilized world grew sympa- 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. 159 

thetic in her cause, until the very name of Pole, whether 
applied to those who chafed at home under the thrall 
of despotism, or those who were sorrowing abroad in 
exile, became a symbol of the love of country. The 
spread of farms is fatal to the growth of penitentiaries. 

— Joseph W. Wmans. 

152. Conditions of Successful Farming. — Agri- 
culture can be successful only where the people are 
moral ; where they try diligently to learn the conditions 
of success in treating the land, and will receive it as a 
trust; and where, too, the State is so well and justly 
organized that near markets are afforded, so that the 
soil can receive back the aliments received from it and 
essential to its fertility. As yet in history the king- 
doms have been very few that could take care of and 
develop their richest soils. They have known enough 
to be warriors and conquerors, to create literature, to 
gem magnificent temples and museums with trophies of 
art; but they have not known enough to be successful 
farmers, to insure the fir tree for the thorn and the 
myrtle tree for the brier, to bring out and keep out the 
beauty on the land which Providence designed, and to 
base a permanent civilization on fields thoroughly 
plowed and refreshed, and on meadows and morasses 
dried, diked, and guarded by watchful energy and thrift. 

— Thomas Starr King. 

153. The True Nobleman. — The farmer is the 
true nobleman of nature. . He enjoys a rank superior 
to that of the patricians of all other orders. The chief 



160 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

nobles of every country in Europe derive their titles 
from their estates; as if the battle-fields, reeking with 
their red glories, could afford no appellation so endear- 
ing- and honorable as the little farm upon which a hero 
was born. His avocation renders him tolerant and kind, 
industrious and hospitable, independent and free. In 
peace, he is amicable, in war, invincible. Every blow 
that he strikes, either with his sword or his hoe, is 
struck for mankind. The farm-house is the true Temple 
of Liberty, the Shrine of Virtue, the Altar of Patriot- 
ism.— /'Fzy/z'^;?^ H. Rhodes. 

1B4. The Farmer Face to Face with God. — 
Abandoned, indeed, must be the heart of that man 
whose tongue could blaspheme or refuse to honor the 
name of the Most High, while the very birds are thril- 
ling the air with the notes of His praise. Every occu- 
pation of the farmer brings him, as it were, face to face 
with his Maker, and teaches him lessons of truth, justice 
and piety. When he plows his ground and sows his 
seed, he relies not upon the slippery promises of men, 
but upon God himself, to supply the moisture and to 
so temper the atmosphere as to sprout the seed and 
mature the crop. Every flower that blooms, every 
blade of grass that grows, and every insect that crawls, 
tell him of the wisdom, power, goodness, justice, and 
mercy of the Almighty. When he plucks from the 
tree the rich, ripe fruit, as it hangs in tempting clusters 
around the parent stem, how sublime the thought that 
he receives this luscious food direct from God^ no mor- 
tal hand intruding between the giver and the receiver 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. IGl 

to break the charm which Divinity throws around the 
precious gift. Accustomed as he is to rely upon God 
and his own strong arm for what he eats, drinks :md 
wears, he dares to think what is right, and to speak 
and act as he thinks. — Zachary Montgomery. 

156. The Farmer The Universal Master. — We 
cotild strike from society the merchant, lawyer, doctor, 
manufacturer and mechanic, and still the human family 
could be sustained in the enjoyment of life; still the 
great work of moral and mental improvement could go 
on. But strike from society the farmer's calling, para- 
lyze the farmer's hand, and society would not alone be 
shaken to its base, but its very foundations would be 
swept away so utterly as to leave not a wreck behind. 
Let the seasons but for one year cease to yield their 
fertilizing influence, the husbandman's labors throughout 
the world fail for one year, and wherever civilized 
man exists would be exhibited a scene of desolation 
and woe, such as was felt in Egypt when the angel of 
death went forth and struck down the eldest-born in 
every household. The worst scenes of the French 
Revolution, the hour of its deepest and darkest orgies, 
would everywhere appear ; death would be on every 
hand ; suffering at every door. Every father would 
mourn the death of his first-born; every mother would 
be a Rachel, weeping for her children, because they 
were not. '"' '" ''• Three-quarters of all the people in 
the United States are engaged in farming. The farmer 
alone is independent; he alone is master of the labor 

and the talents of every other class. His avocation is 
11 



162 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

the highest of all arts. Has the plodding plowman 
ever thought of that ? It is not only a higher pursuit, 
being independent of all others, but it is the highest of 
all arts. It is even given to the farmer and gardener 
to do that which in poetical conception, was considered 
impossible — "to paint the lily and add fresh perfume to 
the violet." 

It is most singular that this pursuit, that employs the 
greatest part of our population, the most important in 
its interests, upon which all other pursuits depend and 
on which society itself exists, has never been fostered 
by the Government, which also depends upon it for its 
own maintenance. No statesman has taken a large 
view of the agricultural interest, to make it the basis 
of an extensive political economy. But such is the 
fortunate position of the farming interest that it needs 
not this support. It is one of its greatest triumphs, 
one of its noblest encomiums, that it can say: "I care 
not for the protection of the Government. All I ask 
of Government is to let me alone; let me take care of 
myself, and I will take care of myself and you, too." 

— Tod Robinson. 

156. The Farm the Abode of Content. — The 
judicious and methodical farmer extracts abundant 
leisure for domestic duties and home delights. In the 
good progress of the agricultural art, he can still hover 
about his domestic circle, and bend upon it the proper 
amount of regard and attention. He may not, by some 
hazardous speculation in trade, realize a startling in- 
crease to his hoards, but he is ever certain of compe- 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. 163 

tence, and can surely calculate on moderate gain. Bet- 
ter than all else, he enjoys the sweet repose of heart 
and mind. He clusters about him his intelligent friends, 
and quaffs the nectar of social wisdom. The cares 
and anxieties and acerbities of the great world never 
reach his happy home. The diseased excitements and 
prurient amusements of the great city have no charm 
for him. He revolves about a world of his own. He 
has an isolated fireside of his own, virtuous and happy. 
Gradual old age steals upon him; but it finds him 
cheerful and vigorous, hemmed in on all sides by the 
ramparts of intelligence and affection. So I wonder 
that men of substance linger about a city when the 
country beckons them to affluent bliss. Old Sam 
Johnson applauded a city life to the day of his death. 
But Sam. though a good and a learned man, was 
wedded to his club and his porter and his coterie of 
adulators. He was prejudiced against rusticity; and a 
prejudice with him had the strength that lies in the tail 
of Leviathan. He loved to bully and swagger over 
timid city gentlemen. Old Falstaff, bloated with sack 
to elephantine rotundity, bubbling with civic wit, and 
oozing the lard of metropolitan repartee as a wounded 
whale its blubber, had yet a green cleft amid the sterile 
crags of his memory. Disease, as winnowing wind, 
often puffs aside the chaff of lecherous thought and 
worldly humors, and reveals the grain of earnest and 
truthful nature. Dying in penury and disgrace, his 
mind flew back to his gambols of boyhood upon the 
green sward. He babbled of green fields. The crea- 



164 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

tions of Shakespeare are humanity in its truth and fer- 
vor and condensation. — yames G. Howard. 

157. Sanitary Influence of Trees. — Rich, moist, 
prohfic land, with decaying vegetation, in a chmate hke 
that of portions of the interior of CaHfornia, will pro- 
duce miasma; and the more favorable the conditions 
for vigorous and abundant growth and consequent 
abundance of vegetation to decay, the larger the 
amount of miasma generated or given off Such lands 
will always be sought because profitable for cultivation, 
notwithstanding the penalty attached to residing upon 
them. This penalty may be mitigated or perhaps 
avoided by a knowledge of what has been observed ol 
the laws governing this cause of disease. 

While miasma is given off by decaying vegetation, it 
is absorbed or arrested by growing vegetation. No 
other fact seems to be so universally conceded as this. 
Primitive forests, when left to the undisturbed opera- 
tions of nature, preserve the balance between growth 
and decay, and do not largely generate miasma. It 
does not prevail in the bogs of Ireland, nor in the 
Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina, while 
their surfaces are covered by perpetually growing 
mosses and other vegetation. 

When forests are cut down and the balance destroyed 
between growth and decay, the means provided by 
nature for the absorption of miasma are removed, and 
it is left free to poison the air. This law cannot be 
better illustrated than in the history of the Campagna 
near Rome. At the commencement of the Christian 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. 165 

era it was covered with forests of trees and gardens^ 
On it were erected the magnificent villas of the Em- 
perors Domitian and Hadrian. 

The effect of the destruction of the trees in changing 
this paradise to a pestilential desert is observed by 
every traveler. It is now so terribly stricken hy mala- 
ria that beyond the Church of St. Paul, about two 
miles from the walls of Rome, I could not see a human 
habitation to break the utter solitude. The people 
who cultivate small portions of it, go down from the 
hills each day, long after the sun has risen, do their 
work in the heat of the day, and escape back to the 
hills arain before the sun has set. 

It will be seen how great is the benefit to be derived 
from the planting of forest trees, and how great is the 
crime in the wanton and needless destruction of the 
trees on the borders of our rivers, sloughs and over- 
flowed lands, and the certain penalty that follows this 
crime. — B. B. Redding. 

158. The Farmer a Co-Creator with the In- 
finite. — What honor the highest human intellis^ence 
pays to a painter like Landseer, who puts a superb 
mimic sheep on canvas; or to Troyon, who makes a 
dreamy-eyed beneficent cow look at us from his colors; 
or to Rosa Bonheur, who startles us with tableaux of 
horses clothed with thunder, and bulls whose look 
makes the room unsafe! This is right. But what shall 
we say of the farmers who push out of existence the 
tribes and very types of imperfect or degenerate cattle, 
and call up the actual horses that make the verses of 



166 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Job sing in the brain, and sheep fit to be clad in the 
finest merino, and herds whose very attitude is a ne_w 
masterpiece of lordHness or beauty ? 

In looking at such stock I can easily understand the 
enthusiasm which leads people to invest thousands and 
tens of thousands in the experiments of model farms. 
And then I wonder why anybody is led away by a liter- 
ary or artistic ambition, if he is not conscious of the 
first class of powers. Why will a man try to write 
imperfect rhymes, if he can make a perfect strawberry 
vine or moss rose ? Why put a blundering idea into a 
book, if you can raise a litter of Suffolk pigs, and thus 
see a divine idea multiplied in symmetrical pork ? Why 
waste effort with pigments on canvas, when you can 
put an Alderney calf on a landscape, with eye more 
poetic than any fawn or gazelle ever gazed with — or can 
ennoble an acre with an actual pair of young Devons 
surveying nature in their dumb dignity ? 

These gems of the annual shows make the farmer's 
office seem noble, a co-creator with the infinite. They 
make our average literature and art seem vapid, and in 
one light make society seem sad; for where are the 
men and women in society as yet that are as noble in 
their spheres as these animals — that are fit to own them, 
that come within a distant range of fulfilling their type 
in the Creator's mind, as the beasts do that are unstained 
with sin ? — Thos. Starr King. 

1B9. The Beauty of Rural Homes. — Whoever 
in this fair State of ours, has become owner of a little 
nook of land which, by patient and well directed toil, 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. 167 

may be changed into a garden, must feel in some degree 
as if he were the master of a new and glorious world. 
There lie the fresh and smoking furrows, smiling to 
think of the countless secrets they hide — the fruit and 
leaves and flowers, the shaded walks and the sloping 
lawns; there the new maker plans, in faith and patience, 
for the golden years of a long and useful life. The 
founding of a home is one of the purest joys left to 
fallen man ; it is the blessing which came softly out of 
Paradise with Adam, and has followed his wandering 
children ever since. In the desire for rural homes the 
perennial freshness of humanity is revealed. As every 
successive generation of children love to pull corn-silk, 
and tumble in the hay-fields, so every generation of 
busy, over-worked men, lawyers, politicians, merchants, 
editors, love to unfasten the chafing harness at times, 
and choose some happy spot, by the rippling streams, 
where they may be new Adams, received again into 
Paradise — new dwellers in Arcadia. Our modern 
intense life draws men in early manhood to the centers 
of activity, where fortunes and reputations are to be 
won ; but their hearts, as they grow older, turn back to 
the grassy fields, the blooming gardens, the quiet hearth, 
the country freedom; and they remember with deeper 
affection the old farm-house of their boyhood, the fruit- 
ful orchards, the fragrant garden. 

Men have a curious habit of stamping their person- 
ality on the clothes they wear, the team they drive, the 
house they live in, and all their property, real and per- 
sonal. In a most complete sense the grounds a man 
lays out, takes care of, and enjoys, become like himself; 



1G8 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

or rather, in a very precise way, give us glimpses of 
his nature and hints of his possibiHties. Indeed, I love 
to notice the constant changes and little improvements in 
every village through which I pass, and make wonder- 
ing guesses concerning the owners of each successive 
cottage. Altheas, lilacs, a damask rose, groups of pan- 
sies, and clambering wealth of sweet peas, with perhaps 
a sugar maple, evidently cherished — it is a suggestion 
of a New England family. An Irish yew-tree by the 
gate, a row of black currants along the fence, Shrop- 
shire damsons and Kentish cherries in the orchard, box 
borders and Covent Garden Stocks — this is staid, portly 
old England, surely. Bottle gourds over the well, 
balsams and crape myrtle by the door, melons 
and gumbo in the vegetable garden — here is a 
picture from the sunny South. Dill, saffron, yellow 
marrigolds, sun-flowers and horse-beans, in straight 
rows, in front of a door painted red, yellow and blue — 
this can only be a Portuguese family from the Azores. 
It is the charm of California, in the eyes of her children, 
that so many variations are possible here; so many 
widely different types of gardening succeed and blend 
harmoniously in our landscapes. The man who chooses 
his nook of earth and founds a home there, is justly en- 
titled to that too-often bestowed title of "public bene- 
factor." The tired travelers, plodding wearily along 
the dusty summer road, look gladly on the waving spires 
of green, the soft, bright grass, the cool fountains, the 
flashes of color from the well kept beds, the bend- 
ing and fruitful boughs, and are made more hopeful by 
all this beauty and repose. It is for the owner a daily 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. 169 

blessing. As the years increase, the hallowed memo- 
ries of home thickly cluster. The voices of happy 
children, some of them no longer on earth, and thus 
eternally young, yet seem to echo beneath the arching 
trees, which his own hand planted long before. The 
blue-bells and the violets, the fragrant lilies and the 
passion-hearted roses — these carry his dreams back to 
his boyhood, and move his soul to tears. The im- 
pulse is justified which led him to found a home. 

— Ckas. H. Shinn. 

160. The Farmer the Monarch of Men. — Who 
is nurtured with such an education as the farmer ? He 
is nursed in the strong embrace of prolific, many- 
handed Nature, our mother who keeps the wisest 
school, and who is the voice and the hand, the ferule 
and the prize of Deity. I almost believe that no man 
can be one of God's great men, unless nurtured in the 
embrace of our great mother — on the bosom of the 
earth. All men should, some time in their lives, live 
out in the midst of nature, and till the soil. He who 
has been born and reared and lives in a city, debarred 
from the privilege of communing with Nature, is most 
unfortunate. He can never be a whole man. He lacks 
the stern, true, poetic teachings of the Great School. 
Nothing can compensate for it. An undevout farmer 
is a monster. Can the husbandman receive his food 
direct from heaven — its rains and dews and sunshine — 
its smile over him in the blue and peaceful vault, sun- 
and-moon-and-star-lit? — all around him the wavy grass 
and grain, the many tinted flowers, the voices of the 



170 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

wind and bending trees — underneath him the prolific, 
fresh-turned soil — and still be a monster, out of tune 
with Nature? Who lives so far from temptation, so 
nigh to his Creator, enwrapt all round about with his 
arms, fed from his dazzling, munificent hand, sleeps 
between the leaves of God pictured book — the Uni- 
v.erse. "'' "" '" His tyranny is over barrenness. He 
smites, and lo! the sterile earth groans — but it is with 
abundance. He brinofs his enemies to the fasfSfot and 
stake — but they are the thorn, the thistle and the brier. 
He overruns and subdues the territories of his foes — 
but they are the swamp, the fen, and the quagmire. 
He plows up the very foundations of the strongholds 
of his destroyers — but they are the deadly malaria, the 
stinging insect, and the fanged, poisonous reptile. The 
Earth is his slave, but it is the slavery of love, for it 
buds and blossoms before him, and its trees clap their 
hands for joy of him. He chains his servants to do 
his will, but they are the elements, they are the huge 
and willing ox, the majestic horse, impatient to do his 
bidding, and champing for the word that bids him go. 
When he stretches his scepter abroad, cities spring up 
under its shadow. The sounds of the spindle, the 
loom and the anvil, and the ponderous foundry and 
mill, are heard. The hum of industry comes like the 
noise of many waters ; white-winged ships fly over 
the unstable main; men cast aside their hides and fig 
leaves, and put on imperial garments ; women are 
arrayed in fabrics fine as gossamer, and many tinted as 
the sun-set cloud. Penury, pestilence and famine he 
keeps bound in his prison house. Labor stands in the 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. 171 

door of his magazine, and in his stalwart hands he holds 
scales of human life, and weighs out the supplies of 
Trade and Art and Armies; of School and Church and 
State ; Food and Raiment ; Abundance and Luxury. 
He deals out the Progress of Human Kind! He is 
the Monarch of Men ! — Samuel B. Bell. 

161. A Vast Field of Knowledge. — Aericulture 
to the active intellect is fruitful in subjects of thought 
and contemplation, and, when intelligently pursued, the 
whole being is enriched by the vast field of knowledge 
it unfolds. It is an occupation that elevates the mind 
to a genial communion with surrounding nature; it is 
closely connected with the material wants of the whole 
human family; it develops and beautifies the earth; it 
produces a healthy, thrifty and virtuous population ; 
and, more than any other pursuit known to man, adds 
to the pride, prosperity and strength of a State. That 
it is intimately connected with the education and intelli- 
gence of a community, is clearly proved in the history 
of our country as well as the history of the world. To 
man's necessities, comfort and happiness, the tillage 
and yield of the soil are of the first consequence; and 
an intelligent prosecution of his work requires from the 
agriculturist a familiarity with the causes and effects of 
his labor, and a knowledge of botany and chemistry, 
which aids him in the development of his resources, 
and elevates his calling to the dignity of a science. 
The classic authors and orators of Greece and Rome 
delighted to write and speak of agriculture, and labored 
to instil a love for it into the mind. In those ancient 



172 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

times, the highest citizens and most prominent states- 
men — the most successful warriors and the most con- 
vincing writers — were cultivators of the soil. Even 
kings and princes have been known to resign their power 
to become farmers, while farmers have been called from 
the field to become kings. The familiar story of Cin- 
cinnatus, who, in the days of the old Roman Republic, 
received an embassy from the people while in the very 
act of plowing in the field, had an illustrious prototype 
in the example of Elisha, whose mantle of a prophet 
was urged upon him while working his land with a team 
of twelve yoke of oxen. Among the great of modern 
times who have devoted themselves to farming, was he 
who was " first in peace " as in war. Few probably 
ever possessed so keen a love for rural pursuits, and a 
more unyielding pride in the profession of a farmer, 
than George Washington. Always an early riser, he 
was enabled to see that the day's work was properly 
begun, and careful to exact the utmost accuracy and 
fidelity from those he employed. Before the war his 
name was known in London as the most reliable planter 
in Virginia, and the produce of his plantations would 
command a better price than that of any other in the 
colonies. "I think," he said, "the life of a husbandman 
of all others is the most delightful. It is honorable, it 
is amusing, and with judicious management it is profita- 
ble." If it be true, then, that the dignity of a calling 
depends upon the character of those who pursue it, the 
status of the agriculturist has been fixed and ennobled 
from the remotest ages of the world to the present day. 

— Lcland Stanford. 



the farm and garden. 173 

162. The Base of the Whole Fabric of Life. — 
As we stand and live upon our great mother earth, so 
the whole fabric of enlightened life stands upon agricul- 
ture. Not alone because it feeds and clothes our bodies, 
but because of its moral and philosophic forces as well 
as its physical. Egypt was the first cradle of agricul- 
ture; it was, therefore, the first cradle of civilization. 
The Israelites — the chosen people— were no excep- 
tion to the rule. In their early career, they did not 
till the soil. They had to be taken down into Egypt 
to learn Agriculture, or they w^ould have been barbarians. 
The Greek and the Roman would have been barbarians 
had they not learned agriculture. Men are mere tribes 
— hordes — without agriculture. It is the mother of 
stability, with infinite progression. It is the mother of 
wealth, of law and order, of manufactures, commerce 
and the arts. From this source spring the great emo- 
tions of the soul, patriotism, social and political order, 
churches, schools, science and religion, long life, strong 
life, abundance. Without it the world could not be 
populated. Pioneering tends to barbarism, because it 
tends to roving. Pioneering is almost buccaneering. 
We are pioneers (a. d. 1858) and yet see here this 
early and devout attention to agriculture. We are the 
mildc;st mannered buccaneers of history. What had 
this State done without agriculture.'* The present 
generation might have survived in some sort of repute, 
from the force of early education; but the generation 
to come would have been as the present Arab to the 
ancient Saracen, the present Mexican to the .ancient 
Spanish Cavalier. Gold is not wealth; it is but its con- 



174 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

venient representative. Commerce is not wealth; it 
simply exchanges it. Manufactures and art are not 
wealth; they recombine it. Agriculture is the prolific 
mother of wealth. The rest simply handle it when it 
is produced and delivered into their hand. The earth 
breeds savages; agriculture breeds enlightened nations. 
It breeds houses and ships, temples and seminaries, 
manufactories, sculpture, painting and music. It would 
be folly to speak of the existence, beauty or power of 
any of these, without agriculture. The thermometer of 
civilization rises or falls as drives or pauses the plow. 

— Samuel B. Bell. 

163. Nature Enforces Economy Toward The 
Soil. — Have you read in one of the volumes of "Les 
Miserables," Victor Hugo's description of the sewer of 
Paris, and his reflections on it ? He tells his country- 
men that all that filth is gold, and that they sweep it 
into the abyss. We fit out convoys of ships, at great 
expense, to gather up at the south pole the droppings 
of petrels and penguins, and the incalculable element 
of wealth which we have under our own hand we send 
to sea. All the fertilizing substance, human and ani- 
mal, which the world loses, restored to the land, instead 
of being thrown into the water, would sufBce to nourish 
the world. These heaps of garbage at the corners of 
the stone blocks, these tumbrels of mire jolting through 
the streets at nicfht, these horrid scavengers' carts, 
these streams of subterranean slime, which the pave- 
ment hides from you, do you not know what all this is? 
It is the flowering meadow; it is the green grass, it is 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. 175 

marjoram and thyme and sage; it is game, it is cattle, 
it is the satisfied low of huge oxen at evening; it is 
perfumed hay, it is golden corn, it is bread on your 
table, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is 
joy, it is life. Thus wills that mysterious creation which 
is transformation upon earth, and transformation in 
heaven. There is one thing in which the half-civilized 
Mongolians can defy their civilized foes to instruct 
them — the great art of keeping the soil fertile steadily 
for centuries. Japan is about as large as England and 
Ireland combined. So much of its area is hilly that 
hardly more than half is fit for tillage. Great Britain 
imports food from other countries to the extent of many 
millions annually. But Japan supports a larger popu- 
lation than England and Ireland. She exports grain 
now to foreign countries. She maintains the richness 
of her soil, and has kept it at a high and even rate 
of productiveness through centuries that stretch back 
beyond the decay of Greece, beyond the birth of Rome, 
to the days of Solomon, possibly to the age of Moses. 
She has done it by careful obedience to the laws of 
restoration which God has written in the soil. She 
treats the soil as a factory. Wanting cloth from it, she 
gives the woof out of which the cloth is woven. She 
finds that Nature will toil for man forever, if man will 
give her the elements of her miracles. She reverently 
offers to the wand of Providence the filth of cities, that 
it may be transmuted into flowers and bread. Cali- 
fornia will prove no exception to the general law of 
nature which enforces economy toward the soil. The 
Creator gives our land to us as a trust, and if we do 



176 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

not try to pass it over to our children with but Httle 
reduction of its vitaHty, we are simply squandering our 
capital in our great harvests now, and mortgaging also 
the patrimony of posterity. — TJiomas Starr King. 



THE GARDENS OF THE PETERSKOI. 

164. I spent an evening at the Peterskoi, which I 
shall long remember as one of the most interesting I 
ever spent at any place of popular amusement. The 
gardens of Peterskoi are a favorite place of resort in 
summer, near Moscow — famous for its chateau built by 
the Empress Elizabeth, in which Napoleon sought 
refuQ^e during^ the burningf of Moscow. The weather 
was charming; neither too warm nor too cool, but of 
that peculiarly soft and dreamy temperature which pre- 
disposes one for the enjoyment of music, flowers, the 
prattle of children, the fascinations of female beauty, 
and the luxuries of idleness. In such an atmosphere 
no man of sentiment can rack his brain with trouble- 
some problems concerning the origin of the human race, 
or abuse his limbs rambling through dirty streets in 
search of curiosities, or do any other labor usually 
allotted to the tourist. Such evenings, and such nights, 
when the sun lingers dreamily on the horizon, when the 
long twilight weaves a web of purple and gold that binds 
the niofht to the morninof; when nature, wearied of the 
dazzling glare of day, puts on her delicate silver-span- 
gled night robes, and reclining upon her couch, smiles 
upon her loving worshipers, and tells them to "woo 



THE FARM AND GARDEN, 177 

her gently, and with honeyed words," when stubborn 
hearts are softened and haughty eyes made gentle by 
the invisible spirits that hover in the air — ah, surely 
such evenings and such nights were never made for 
sleep. The veriest monster in human shape cannot be 
utterly insensible to their inspiring influence. We must 
make love, sweet ladies, or die. 

The gardens of the Peterskoi are still • a dream to 
me. It was night when I first entered their portals. 
Guards, in imperial livery, glittering from head to foot 
with richly-wrought embroidery, stood at the gateway 
and ushered in the company with many profound and 
elegant bows. Policemen, with cocked hats and glitter- 
ing epaulettes, were stationed at intervals along the 
leading thoroughfares, to preserve order. The scene 
within was singularly rich, glowing and fanciful. In 
every feature it presented some striking combination 
of natural and artificial beauties, admirably calculated 
to fascinate the imac^ination. I have a vasfue recollec- 
tion of shady and undulating walks, winding sometimes 
over sweeping lawns, dotted with wide-spreading trees, 
copses of shrubbery and masses of flowers; sometimes 
over gentle acclivities, surmounted by rustic cottages, 
or points of rocks overhung with moss and fern; here 
branching off into cool umbrageous recesses, where 
caves, with glittering stalactites, invited the wayfarer 
to linger a while and rest; there driving suddenly into 
deep glens and retired grottos, where lovers, far hidden 
from the busy throng, might mingle their vows with the 
harmonv of fallingf waters. 

What a pity we should ever grow old, in this beauti- 

12 



178 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

ful world, with so many fair ladies in it to be wooed and 
won! Who could be insensible to their charms on such 
a night and amid such scenes, when the very flowers 
are whispering love to each other, and the lights and 
shadows are wrought into bridal wreaths? Here one 
can fancy the material world has ceased. Reality is 
merored into the realms of enchantment. Marble 
statues, representing the Graces, winged Mercuries and 
Cupids, with their bows and arrows, are so cunningly 
displayed in relief against the green banks of foliage, 
that they seem the natural inhabitants of the place. 
Snow-spirits, too, with outspread wings, hover in the 
air, as if to waft cooling zephyrs through the soft, sum- 
mer night. Fountains dash their sparkling waters high 
into the moonlight, spreading a mystic spray over the 
rich green sward. Through vistas of shrubbery gleam 
the bright waters of a lake, overhung by cliffs and em- 
battled towers and the drooping foliage of trees. On 
an elevated plateau stand Asiatic temples and pagodas, 
in which the chief entertainments are held. The ap- 
proaching avenues are illuminated with brilliant and 
many colored lights, hung from the branches of trees, 
and wind under triumphal arches overhung with flowers. 
Theaters present open fronts, richly and curiously dec- 
orated. Artificial grottoes and fountains, that seem to 
cast forth glittering gems; temples and embattled 
towers, palaces and ruins — all aglow with brilliant and 
mysterious lights, are scattered in sumptuous profusion 
over the grounds. The open spaces in front of the 
theaters are filled with the rank and fashion of the city, 
in all the glory of jeweled head dresses, brilliant cos- 



THE FARM AND GARDEN. 179 

tumes, and decorations of Orders. Festoons of va- 
rieorated licrhts swino; from the trees over the audience. 
Painted figures of dragons and genii guard every ave- 
nue. Rustic seats and elegant divans are scattered in 
the most inviting nooks, and tables, overshadowed by 
hanging rocks, spangled with stalactites of silver, indi- 
cate where rest and refreshment lend their aid to the 
varied pleasures of the eye. The gorgeous profusion 
of lights and glittering ornaments, the endless variety of 
colors, the Asiatic character of the various temples of 
pleasure, the tropical luxuriance of the foliage; the 
gleaming white statuary; the gay company; the soft 
strains of music — all combine to make a scene of won- 
derful enchantment. High, overhead, dimly visible 
through the tops of the trees, the sky wears a rich, 
strange, almost preternatural aspect, in the short sum- 
mer nights. A soft, golden glow, flushes upward from 
the horizon, and lying outspread over the firmament, 
gives a peculiar spectral effect to the gentler and more 
delicate sheen of the moon. The stars shrink back 
into the dim infinity, as if unable to contend with the 
grander and more glowing effulgence of the great orb 
that rules the night; and the rapt spectator is uncon- 
scious whether the day is waning into the night or th j 
night into the morning. All is a grand anomaly — a 
rich, strange, and inexplicable combination of the 
glories of art with the wonders of nature. — J. Ross 
Browne. 



SOCIEH AND THE STATE. 



PART VI. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 



165. Dueling, — I utter my unqualified condemna- 
ture of the code which offers to personal vindictiveness 
a life due only to a country, a family, and to God. If 
I were, under any circumstances, an advocate for a 
duel, it should be at least a fair, equal and honorable 
duel. If, as was said by an eloquent advocate in its 
favor, " it was the light of past ages, which shed its 
radiance upon the hill-tops of civilization, although its 
light might be lost in the dark shade of the valleys 
below," I still maintain that a duel should be fair and 
equal; that skill should not be matched against igno- 
rance, practical training against its absence. No duel 
should stand the test of public opinion, independent of 
the law, except the great element of equality is there. 
In the pursuits of common life, no one not trained to a 
profession is supposed to be a match for a professional 
man in the duties of his profession. I am no match for 
a physician in any matters connected with his pursuits, 
nor would a physician be a match for me in a legal 
argument. The civilian not trained to the use of arms 
is no match for the soldier; nor, although his courage is 
equal, and he may have a profound conviction that he 



182 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

is right, will, therefore, the contest be rendered equal 
and just. I denounce the system itself, because it 
loses annually hundreds of valuable lives, and, in the 
present state of civilization, it does no good, profits 
nothing, arrests no evil, but impels a thousand evils; 
but, above all, do I protest against any contests of this 
nature where, in skill, knowledge of weapons, or from 
any cause, the parties are not equal in all the conditions 
of that stern debate. 

The code of honor is a delusion and a snare. It 
palters with the hope of a true courage, and binds it at 
the feet of crafty and cruel skill. It surrounds its 
victim with the pomp and grace of the procession, but 
leaves him bleeding on the altar. It substitutes cold 
and deliberate preparation for courageous and manly 
impulse, and arms the one to disarm the other. It may 
prevent fraud between practiced duelists, who should 
be forever without its pale ; but it makes the mere 
" trick of the weapon " superior to the noblest cause 
and the truest courage. Its pretence of equality is a 
lie. It is equal in all the form, it is unequal in all the 
substance. The habitude of arms, the early training, 
the frontier life, the border war, the sectional custom^ 
the life of leisure — all these are advantages which no 
negotiation can neutralize and which no courage can 
overcome. 

Whatever there is, in the code of honor or out of it, 
that demands or allows a deadly combat where there is 
not in all things entire and certain equality, is a prosti- 
tution of the name, is an evasion of the substance, and 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 183 

is a shield, blazoned with the name of Chivalry, to 
cover the malignity of murder. — Gen. E. D. Baker. 

166. Popular Corruption. — For a lying press, 
for iniquitous politicians, and an ignorant pulpit, for the 
absurdities of fashion and the injustice of society, for 
prostitution, for gambling, for thieving, for the 
knaveries of the scheming capitalist, the grinding of 
monopolists, and the swindlings of corporations, the 
people have only themselves to blame, for all these 
enormities spring from the people and exist only on 
the sufferance of the people. — Hubert H. Bancroft. 

167. Popular Justice. — I have the fullest confi- 
dence in the ultimate justice and judgment of the 
people. I am not afraid of them at all. Sometimes, 
when they do not understand, they stone the prophets, 
revile earnest reformers, and hang innocent men; but 
when, too late, they discover their error, they return in 
surging multitudes, build costly monuments over the 
victims of their phrenzy, plant sweet blooming fiowers, 
and water them with their tears. When the Athenian 
populace had accused Aristides of conspiracy, and had 
banished him from the Capital, they found out their 
mistake, and called him back with acclamation; and 
when, in the theater that night, the actor spoke of a 
true patriot and a just man, the whole audience rose 
and turned toward the exile. That was the most 
triumphant hour in the life of the warrior and states- 
man — grander, more glorious, more exultant than that 
of Marathon. Some years ago the people of San 



184 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Francisco chased away an eloquent old man, (Gen. E. 
D. Baker — Editor,) who took refuge in the mountains 
of Nevada. He was afterwards brouQ;ht back from 
the sacrificial heio;hts of Stone River, a mangled and 
speechless prophet of freedom, and fifty thousand peo- 
ple laid him tenderly on the altitudes of Lone Mount- 
ain, within hearing of the eternal dirges of the ocean — 
while his glorious declaration echoed and still echoes 
in the valleys and mountains from the fountains of the 
San Joaquin to the sources of the Columbia: "Years, 
years ago, I took my stand by Freedom, and where in 
youth my feet were planted, there my manhood and 
my age shall march." — Gcfi. yohn A. Collins. 

168. Catholicity of Spirit. — Momus blamed 
Jupiter because, when he made man he put no window 
in his breast through which the heart micfht be seen. 
Momus was a sleepy god; and we mortals are likewise 
troubled with a lack of insight into human character. 
No doubt Jupiter should have done better. Man is far 
from a perfect creation. But as the gods saw fit to do 
no more for us, thanking them for what they have done, 
may we not now do something for ourselves ? Were 
not the eyes of Momus somewhat at fault, as well as the 
fingers of Jupiter? If we lay aside the narrowing 
prejudices of birth and education, under the influences 
of which it is impossible to balance nicely the actions 
of men, may we not discover here and there openings 
into the soul ? The homily of glowing patriot or zeal- 
ous sectarian, is not history, but verbiage. Let all 
that is worthy of censure in state, church and society, 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 185 

be condemned; let all that is worthy of praise be ex- 
tolled; but let not censure and praise be meted out ac- 
cording to the maxims of country or creed. Let us 
meet every age and nation upon the broad platform of 
humanity, measuring no man's conscience by our own, 
but by the conscience of nature, and condemning cruelty 
and injustice wherever we find it, whether in Hebrew, 
Turk, Christian, Spaniard, or Anglo-Saxon. I hold it 
to be no less unwise than dishonest to wage vitupera- 
tive warfare against any nation or sect, as such. 
Would he keep pellucid the stream of thought, with 
his piety and patriotism, the writer of history will have 
little to do. — HiibciH H. Bancroft. 

169. Social Artifices. — It is all very well for 
those who are perched upon the highest pinnacles to thng 
out the old aphorism, that water will always reach its 
level. They forget, for the nonce, that it is quite possi- 
ble to force water above its level by artificial appliances, 
and to keep it there, for a time, at least. Hydraulic 
pressure lends a momentum quite equal to the attain- 
ment of such results. Not more difficult is it to pre- 
vent water from reaching its level, by shutting it out 
almost entirely, by the construction of coffer dams. 
There are hydraulic rams constantly at work amid the 
complicated machinery of society; and their potent 
moving force is felt in the uplifting of many a dead 
weight into a hateful prominence, that would otherwise 
lie prone at the bottom. — Sarah B. Cooper. 

170. Modern Civilization. — It may be a con- 
tested point whether modern civilization is more pro- 



186 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

ductive of human happiness and morality than of vice 
and misery. It is true that culture and refinement, 
while they broaden the scope of joys and duties, 
and stimulate the moral and intellectual attributes, 
must increase the capabilities of crime. The educated 
villain can accomplish more evil than the ignorant 
knave can conceive. The heart of the cultivated and 
refined man can feel keener pangs than the benighted 
and blunted sensibilities of the primitive boor can 
imagine. But herein may lie the fallacy: It is not 
that enlightenment increases disproportionately crime 
over virtue, sorrow over gladness, but that it illumi- 
nates, and brings into such hideous contrast, the ex- 
tremes, so that we forget the bright, while we look 
lamentingly on the dark side of the picture. Those of 
us who are of the Pioneers of '50 and '52, know from 
experience, without the aid of rhetoric or logic, the 
change for gfood which the humanizino; influences of 
cultivated, social and intellectual society has wrought 
here in California. Where once the jingling of gold 
in the gfamblinof dens constituted the Sabbath music, 
broken now and then by the muttered oath or the 
shrieks of dying men, are now heard the swelling tones 
of the organ mins^lino; with the voices of the wor- 
shipers of God. — Nathaiiiel Bennett. 

111. Continuous Social Advance. — In the pres- 
ent state of knowledge, the mystery of civilization, or 
social progress, like all the phenomena of evolution, is 
unexplainable ; and whatever opinion we may hold as 
to natural agencies, and supernatural interpositions, we 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 187 

can best see marked by the centuries, a permanent and 
continuous unfolding and improvement, acting under 
laws as fixed as those which regulate siderial systems. 
Yet though predetermined and fixed in its efforts and 
results, like the plant artificially dwarfed or improved, 
progress may be hindered or accelerated by the charac- 
ter of individuals and the politics of society. Social 
disruptions, moral earthquakes, mobs, murders, and out- 
raged law, no less than literature, art, industry, and 
wealth, in their action and reaction on each other, fer- 
tilize intellect and stimulate intellectual growth. 

— Hubert H. Bancroft. 

172. Our Moral Inheritance. — The geologists 
say that the earth's surface is made up of layers of 
sandstone, limestone, chalk and marl, the products of 
successive deposits. The moral world is as truly made 
up of layers of opinions hardened into beliefs ; of senti- 
ments, and thoughts. The best father of most of us is 
our great past. A man endowed with millions and 
with boundless square leagues of real estate, but with 
the civilization that he inherits all cancelled, is poorer 
than the poorest citizen surrounded by, and partaking 
in, our civilization. Better for us to lose the whole of 
our army and navy, and that all our ports be laid waste, 
than that one per cent, be abated of our respect for the 
forms of a public meeting, of our regard for law, of our 
love of home, of our dread of riot and anarchy. In 
the one case we part with the evidences and immediate 
instruments of our power, which may be replenished ; 
in the other we part with the forces that we have 
inherited from ages. — Thomas Starr King. 



188 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

173. Wine. — This conglomerate which you call 
society is hanging out a great many flags of distress. 
It babbles incoherently of perfectibility, and goes 
straightway to the bad. Are those reformers going to 
save the world, who, either through intemperance of 
speech or drink, must needs be moderated by a padlock 
put upon their mouths ? Nor is it safe, just now, to 
calculate the results of this feminine gospel of vitupera- 
tion. The back of the body politic may be the better 
for having a fly-blister laid on; and it might, perhaps, 
as well be done by feminine hands as by any other. 
But there are some evils too deep for surface remedies. 
If, for instance, vineyards are going to curse the people, 
as my moralizing friend insists, then humanity here- 
about is in a bad way, and needs reconstructing from 
the nethermost parts to the bald crown of the head. 
Why, a little generous wine ought to enrich the blood 
and inspire nobility of thought. If it does more than 
this — if it becomes a demon to drive men and hoe^s 
into the sea — then it is evident that both were on too 
low a plane of existence for any safe exaltation. 
But shall the vineyards be rooted up for all this } 
It is better to drown the swine, and let the grapes 
still grow purple upon the hill-sides. Oh, my 
friend, with thin and impoverished blood! do not pinch 
this question up in the vise of your morality. No 
doubt there was a vineyard in Eden, and there were 
ripe clusters close by the fig leaves. You cannot prove 
to me that sinless hands have not plucked the grapes, 
and that millions will not do it agfain. What we need 
is not a greater company of wailing prophets, but men 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 189 

who will reveal to us the higher and nobler use of 
thinors. — Rev. W. C. Bartlett. 

174. Conservatives and Radicals. — How con- 
stantly the different classes of mind are supplied. Con- 
servatives and radicals are made so more by nature 
than by argument. Some are born to hark for the 
tramp of new truths, to watch for gleams of new reve- 
lations; others are born to live with their faces nobly 
turned to the past. No nation is without her pro- 
gressive party, and no community, however fast, with- 
out its party of conservatives. If all were bound to 
cfo ahead, our (growth would be like the g-ourds. If 
the Hunker element were in excess, the tree would be 
all gnarls and knots. Where both are present, we have 
society like an oak, believing in air and leaves, with 
tough, wide-spreading limbs and twigs that respond to 
everv breeze, and coarse, rou^h bark and roots that 
mine the earth and fill the soil. If the bold critics of 
governments, if the agitators were all lost from the com- 
munity for a century, we should be like a train of cars 
without an enoine, rottinQ^ on the track; but with noth- 
ing but agitators in a State, we are like a line of loco- 
motives without a car, bound to tear on, so long as fuel 
and track hold out. — Thos. Star}" King. 

17B. The Cause Calls Forth The Man. — All 
the efforts of Science have failed to trace back of itself 
the springs and sources of that subtle thing that we call 
life and know not what it is. So far as we can go is to 
discern back of each living thing some other living 



100 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

thing. Yet so widely are its germs scattered, that, 
given but the conditions that support it, and there will 
life appear. And so it seems in the moral world. 
Whenever in human history occasion and opportunity 
wait the man, forth he steps, and as the common 
worker is on need transformed into a queen bee, so 
when circumstances are favorable, what might other- 
wise pass for a common man, rises into hero or leader, 
sage or saint. So widely has the sower scattered the 
good seed; so strong is the germinative force that bids 
it bud and blossom. But, alas ! for the stony ground, 
and the weeds and the tares ! For one who attains 
his full stature, how many are stunted and deformed ! 

— Henry George. 

176. One-Sided Progress. — The winds do our 
bidding, and the occult pulses of the earth carry our 
words; we weigh the sun and analyze the stars. One 
after another, mightier genii than those that arise in 
Arabian Story have bowed to the call of the lamp of 
knowledge. And yet they throng and come, powers 
more vast, in shapes more towering. But to what end ? 
Look to the van of progress, where the conditions to 
which all progressive countries are tending are most 
fully realized, where wealth is most abundant and popu- 
lation densest — the great cities, where one may walk 
through miles of palaces, where are the grandest 
churches, the greatest libraries, the highest levels of 
luxury, and refinement, and education, and culture. 
Amid the greatest accumulations of wealth men die of 
starvation, and women prowl the streets to buy bread 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 191 

with shame; in factories, where labor-saving machinery 
shows the last march of ingenuity, little children are at 
work who ought to be at play; where the new forces 
are most fully realized, large classes are doomed to 
pauperism or live just on its verge, while everywhere 
the all-absorbing chase of wealth, shows the force of 
the fear of want, and from altars dedicated to the Liv- 
ing God leers the molten image of the Golden Calf. 

Progress thus one-sided is not real, and cannot last. 
No chain is stronger than its weakest link. If the low 
are not brought up, the high shall be pulled down. 
This is the attraction of gravitation of the moral uni- 
verse; it is the fiat of the eternal justice that rules the 
world. It stands forth in the history of every civiliza- 
tion that has had its day and run its course. It is what 
the Sphinx says to us as she sitteth in desert sand, while 
the winored bulls of Nineveh bear her witness! It is 
written in the undecipherable hieroglyphics of Yucatan, 
in the brick mounds of Babylon, in the prostrate Col- 
umns of Persepolis, in the salt-sown plain of Carthage. 
It speaks to us from the shattered relics of Grecian 
art, from the ruins of the Coliseum ! — Hefiry George. 

177. The Decay of Empires. — Science teaches 
that invisible things are more substantial than visible, 
and truth is the food of all that is substantial. Nations 
have seldom been drawn and quartered while in good 
health; they generally die of disease. If true coroners' 
verdicts were written on the tombstones of kingdoms, 
the theories of sensuous history would be sadly contra- 
dicted. Babylon died of delirium tremens; rum did it; 
13 



192 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

in a single night she staggered to her ruin. Nineveh 
was killed by apoplexy; Macedon died of a raging 
fever; Egypt of gluttony and gout; Rome of dropsy. 
We might go further, and make the diagnoses of dis- 
eases that are threatening living nations. — Thos. Starr 
King. 

178. Patriotism. — The life-and-death-struggle of 
a free people to preserve their country is an event 
angels might weep and yet exult to see. Heroism 
defying wounds and death, pouring out its life blood 
freely, is the inspiration of country. Two ideas there 
are which, above all others, elevate and dignify a race, 
the idea of God and the idea of Country. How 
imperishable is the idea of country! How does it live 
within and ennoble the heart in spite of persecutions 
and trials, and difficulties and dangers ! After two 
thousand years of wandering, it makes the Jew a sharer 
in the glory of the prophets, the lawgivers, the warriors 
and poets, who lived in the morning of time. How 
does it toughen every fiber of an Englishman's frame, 
and imbue the spirit of Frenchmen with Napoleonic 
enthusiasm. How does the German carry with him 
even the old house furniture of the Rhine, surround 
himself with the sweet and tender associations of 
Fatherland, and, wheresoever he may be, the great 
names of German history shine like stars in the heaven 
above him. And the Irishman, though the political 
existence of his country is merged in a kingdom whose 
rule he may abhor, yet still do the chords of his heart 
vibrate reponsive to the tones of the harp of Erin, and 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 103 

the lowly shamrock is dearer to his soul than the fame- 
crowning laurel, the love-breathing myrtle, or the 
storm-daring pine. What is our country ? Not alone 
the land and the sea, the lakes and rivers, and valleys 
and mountains — not alone the people, their customs and 
laws — not alone the memories of the past, the hopes of 
the future; it is something more than all these com- 
bined. It is a divine abstraction. You cannot tell 
what it is, but let its flag rustle above your head, you 
feel its living presence in your hearts. They tell us 
that our country must die; that the sun and stars will 
look down upon the Great Republic no more ; that 
already (a. d. 1862 — ^Editor) the black eagles of despo- 
tism are gathering in our political sky. That even 
now kings and emperors are casting lots for the gar- 
ments of our national glory. It shall not be ! Not yet, 
not yet, shall the nations lay the bleeding corpse of our 
country in the tomb. If they could, angels would roll 
the stone from the mouth of the sepulcher. It would 
burst the casements of the grave, and come forth a 
living presence, redeemed, regenerated, disenthralled. 
Not yet, not yet, shall the Republic die. The heavens 
are not darkened, the stones are not rent! It shall 
live — it shall live, the incarnation of freedom, it shall 
live the embodiment of the power and majesty of the 
people. Baptized anew, it shall live a thousand years 
to come, the Colossus of the nations — its feet upon the 
continents, its scepter over the seas, its forehead among 
the stars ! — Newto7i Booth. 

179. Patriotism is but a reflex of egoism, and re- 
spect for statutes and constitutions is but another form 



194 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of loyalty. And as excessive love of country is simply 
excessive self-love, so undue worship of forms of law 
is nothing more than a part of that superstitious loyalty 
which of old held to the doctrine of divine kingship. 
If reverence is any whose due, whatever good there 
may be in loyalty, in that sentiment which unites indi- 
viduals under a common head, it is not the power of 
law which should be reverenced, but the power which 
creates and sustains law. This doctrine of divine king- 
ship appears in a sort of inverted form in the mind of 
the Athenian who held it wrong for a man to rise above 
his fellows — whence ostracism, or oyster-shell voting a 
great man out of the country. — Hubert H. Bancroft. 

180. Politics. — The pursuit of politics is delusive 
and full of temptation. No man should forget the 
duty he owes his country, but all should remember that 
they owe a duty to themselves. When men, more par- 
ticularly young men, see a great statesman stand forth 
in the midst of a listening senate, and mark the stamp 
which he makes upon the public mind, and upon the 
policy of the country, by the force of his intellectual 
vigor, they are apt to forget the labors by which that 
proud position has been achieved ; to forget how many 
have sought to attain such a lofty place and have 
failed; and to forget that he who is filling their minds 
with admiration may be on the eve of a sudden fall. 
Politics should not be the pursuit, I mean the only 
pursuit, of any man. Representative honors, official 
station, should only be the occasional reward, or the 
occasional sacrifice; and if, forgetting this rule, young 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 195 

men attempt to make politics their only hope, with the 
probability that in many cases they will fail, and that, 
if successful, they will surely be exposed to a thousand 
temptations; if they love excitement for its own sake — 
the noisy meetings, the conventions, the elections — this 
love for excitement will grow upon them, and they will 
soon be upon the high road to ruin. If anyone is de- 
termined to achieve, distinction in politics, let him first 
obtain a competency in some trade, profession, or pur- 
suit, and then, even if unsuccessful in politics, the mis- 
step will not be irretrievable. — Gen. E. D. Baker. 

181. Free Trade. — Free trade, the right to buy 
in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, is based 
upon a fundamental law, as inexorable as death, and the 
violation of which is inevitably followed by severe ret- 
ribution. This law no nation can overlook. It is the 
same law which gives to a man the right to enjoy life 
and to hold property without restrictions, except such 
as are absolutely needed for the benefit of the whole 
community of which he forms a part. When a govern- 
ment oversteps these limits, for the benefit of a particu- 
lar class, it in effect destroys rights which are inherent in 
the people, and with which no interference can be justi- 
fied. Commerce should be as free as the air we breathe. 
Its arms should extend to every spot upon the globe 
where human beings exist; and should have the right 
to grasp, unchecked, whatever can contribute to the 
happiness of men. The only regulations it requires 
are those which spring from the natural laws of supply 
and demand. Beyond these, all interference with its 



196 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

operation is simply prescriptive and semi-barbarous; 
because, in addition to other arguments, it checks the 
progress of civilization. Commerce is the great civil- 
izer of the world. Bv facilitatino" intercourse and the 
free interchange of commodities, it conveys the great 
truths of progress into every land and over every sea. 
It knits humanity together; and by the very sympa- 
thies and interests it generates, tends to render war, 
which destroys what peace creates, impossible. That 
commerce must be free, is a decree of nature, before 
which all must bow; so that as it scatters broadcast the 
blessings of liberty, science and the arts may cause 
knowledge to spread, until it shall cover the earth as 
the waters cover the great deep. — Henry E. Highto7i. 

182. National Character.— The orreat thinof for 
statesmen to learn as a primitive fundamental truth is this 
simple fact — that the organization of a State is not effect- 
ed by its paper bonds, but by its moral bonds. The Crea- 
tor always deals with a state as a great person. Laws 
are ever at work beneath the changes of its inhabitants 
and the struggles of its parties, weaving into stable 
character its passing experiences — character which is 
the noblest national reward, or the sternest retribution. 
Individuals are never conscious of this law. Very 
often they think that the forces of a nation's life are 
playing at haphazard. But the law plays around them, 
uses them, and no more permits a state to begin its life 
anew with each sfeneration than it allows a man to be^in 
his life anew after each night's sleep. It is the glory of 
the human intellect that it can detect law in the process 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 197 

of the universe, and see at least in countless threads of 
order, the habits, purposes, and expressions of a crea- 
tive power. Everywhere we turn there is law, and the 
most striking expressions of it are in what we often 
consider to be the region of chance or lawlessness. 
Running up through the realm of science to society, 
and to the life of nations, we find that the apex-truth 
which the intellect discovers, is this : Character is of 
supreme importance for national growth, prosperity and 
stability. How impressive does history seem as a 
study, when we find that every country is a huge 
pedestal, lifting up one national figure, which symbo- 
lizes the pfospects and the perils of the millions that 
dwell around its base. — Thomas Starr King. 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 

183. Slavery is not dead, though its grosssst 
form be gone. What is the difference, whether my 
body is legally held by another, or whether he legally 
holds that by which alone I can live? Hunger is as 
cruel as the lash. The essence of slavery consists in 
taking from a man all the fruits of his labor except a 
bare living, and of how many thousands miscalled free is 
this the lot? Where wealth most abounds there are 
classes with whom the average plantation negro would 
have lost in comfort by exchanging. English villeins 
in the Fourteenth Century were better off than Eng- 
lish agricultural laborers of the Nineteenth. There is 
slavery and slavery. "The widow," says Carlyle, "is 



198 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

gathering nettles for her children's dinner; a perfumed 
seigneur, delicately lounging in the CEil de Bceuf, has 
an alchemy whereby he will extract from her the third 
nettle, and call it rent!" 

Let us not be deluded by names. What is the use 
of a republic if labor must stand with its hat off, beg- 
ging leave to work; if "tramps" must throng the 
highways and children grow up in squalid tenement 
houses? Political institutions are but means to an end 
— the freedom and happiness of the individual; and 
just so far as they fail in that, call them what you will, 
they are condemned. 

Our conditions are changing. The laws which im- 
pel nations to seek a larger measure of liberty, or else 
take from them what they have, are working silently 
but with irresistible force. If we would perpetuate the 
Republic, we must come up to the spirit of the Decla- 
ration, and fully recognize the equal rights of all men. 
We must free labor from its burdens and trade from its 
fetters; we must cease to make ijovernment an excuse 
for enriching the few at the expense of the many, and 
confine it to necessary functions. We must cease to 
permit the monopolization of land and water by non- 
users, and apply the just rule, "no seat reserved unless 
occupied." We must cease the cruel wrong which, by 
first denying their natural rights, reduces laborers to 
the wages of competition, and then, under pretence of 
asserting the rights of another race, compels them to a 
competition that will not merely force them to a stand- 
ard of comfort unworthy the citizen of a free Republic, 
but ultimately deprive them of their equal right to live. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 199 

Here is the test : whatever conduces to their equal 
and inahenable rights to men is good — let us preserve 
it. Whatever denies or interferes with those equal 
rights is bad — let us sweep it away. If we thus make 
our institutions consistent with their theory, all difficul- 
ties must vanish. We will not merely have a republic, 
but social conditions consistent with a republic. If we 
will not do this, we surrender the Republic, either to be 
torn by the volcanic forces that already shake the 
ground beneath the standing armies of Europe, or to 
rot by slow degrees, and in its turn undergo the fate of 
all its predecessors. — Hciuy George. 

^ 184. The Necessities of life, the wants of ad- 
vancing civilization, open a scope for employment wide 
as humanity. They demand the fullest exercise of the 
highest energies of every member of the human race. 
Let Society and Government seek to attain an organi- 
zation wherein Labor shall be elevated to its true 
position, and its claims recognized and rewarded. 
Government taxed to furnish employment ? Why, 
national prosperity must be vitalized every moment by 
increasing toil, or the value that capital represents would 
perish, and money become as worthless as the mere 
pictures on the coins. The roots of the tree of wealth 
must be continually watered by the sweat of the labor- 
er's brow, or its branches would die, its leaves wither, 
and its golden fruit turn to ashes on the lips of its 
possessor. Let labor suspend for a day, and the world 
would feel the shock. Let it cease for a month, and a 
crisis would come, such as commerce never felt, involv- 



200 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

ing banks, moneyed institutions, and national credit in 
common ruin. Let it be idle for a single summer, and 
terror would come down on the strong and the weak, 
beauty would turn pale at the toilet, eloquence become 
dumb in the Senate, ships would open their seams, the 
grass grow in the market-place, and the nations be shaken 
to their foundations. Anarchy, bloody-handed revolu- 
tion, grim and ghastly famine, would shake their snaky 
locks in every land. Let it be paralyzed for a single 
year, and the world would be smitten as with the wrath 
of God. Jehovah, in his awful omnipotence, could 
devise no curse that would more blast, and scorch, and 
desolate the earth. Not Cotton is King; nor Gold. 
Labor is the true Monarch of the world ! With stal- 
wart frame and sinewy arm, and face bronzed and 
scarred, but still with " front of Jove and eye like 
Mars," he must be recrowned— crowned in the starry 
temple of science — with power for his throne, art his 
sceptre, and wealth his sparkling diadem. — Newton 
Booth. 



185. There is no dogma, nor theory, nor de- 
vice under the sun, upon which men have been 
so universally agreed as that the right of property un- 
derlies all true religion, government and civilization. 
Without it, deprived of all motive to acquire beyond 
the most absolute necessity, man would sink into the 
savagedom from which it has taken five thousand years 
to raise him. The justice of allowing unlimited acqui- 
sition is evidenced by the fact that the desire is univer- 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 201 

sal. No natural inherent quality or passion is ours 
without there is lying behind it a benign purpose. 

—James McM. Shafter. 

186. It would be useless, vicious and insane to 
declaim with Proudhon against the rights of property. 
Property is the incentive to exertion. It is the stimu- 
lant which is the preventive of idleness, and its en- 
joyment should be the just reward of honest in- 
dustry. Its security is the very foundation of order. 
Take it away, and society would relapse into that anar- 
chy which is worse than despotism. It would be idle 
and visionary to join with Rousseau in his sentimental 
praises of barbarism. One Shakespeare, or Newton, 
or Fulton, or Washington, were worth all the savage 
tribes that ever lived. The world was not made for 
savages, but for men. We must not recede to a lower 
civilization, but advance to a higher; the type must not 
be broken, but improved. The means of production 
must continue to increase, but the principles of distribu- 
tion must become fair and equitable; the paradox that 
riches and poverty increase in the same ratio must be 
disproved. Wealth must not be diverted into reser- 
voirs to stagnate, but flow out in living streams, perpet- 
ual rivers of abundance, making the landscape beauti- 
ful, the fields green and fruitful, and all the people glad. 
Communists, socialists and Fourierists, have grappled 
with these difficulties in vain. Associations, phalanxes 
and communities, however beautiful in theory, have 
failed in their application to the facts of human nature. 
Society can never be modeled upon an invented plan; 



202 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

it always casts itself in the mould of necessity — it obeys 
its own laws. We must seek in itself, in the ingredi- 
ents as they are, for the powers and agencies that shall 
evolve its improvements. Among these powers, what- 

* ever tends to diffuse the privileges that have been con- 
centrated, to scatter broadcast the blessings that have 
been garnered up, will be a noble and efficient instru- 
mentality for good. A free pulpit, speaking to the 
great heart of the people, a religion that goes into the 
highways and byways, free schools whose doors are 
open to the children of all, a free press sending its 
streams of literature to every man's home, science pop- 
ularized until its great truths blend with the public 

. mind, mechanical arts approaching that perfection that 
will so cheapen the commodities they manufacture as 
to place them withm the reach of all; life and health 
assurances and insurances, enabling the laborer to free 
himself and family from the crushingfear of want in the 
hour of sickness and calamity ; saving societies, whereby 
small sums can be made productive, and by their aggre- 
gation compete with individual wealth, are all remedial 
agencies whose influence will widen and deepen as they 
become more universal and permanent. And if, while 
new inventions continue to increase man's individual 
ability, the laws of distribution are made active, just as 
the powers of production are active, and labor receive 
its fair reward, there need be no fear that society will 
lapse towards barbarism in the pursuit of happiness, no 
fear that phrenzied passions will destroy the rights of 
property in vindication of the rights of man, no fear 
that the seats at the table of life will all be taken. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 203 

There will be room for all who come, at the bountiful 
board which nature will continue to spread, until the 
last syllable of recorded timt-.—Neza.foii BooUl. 

187. So FAR as the labor question, as it is called, 
or labor and capital, is concerned with social discontent, 
there can be no settlement on any present terms of 
labor and capital. It is no local question, but of uni- 
versal human interest, and pervades Christendom. The 
only reconciliation of that difficulty is in moving for- 
ward on to a new ground, where the moral relations of 
employer and workman are recognized as clearly as the 
politico-economic relation. What men want is a respect- 
ful consideration of their welfare. It does not consist 
in the government taking them up, and finding work for 
all who want it. A parental government is a monarchy 
or a despotism where men cannot take care of them- 
selves; but in a free State men are supposed to be of 
age and able to take care of themselves. Capital and 
labor will never be at peace, nor will they ever reap 
their full rewards until they have a material and moral 
interest in each other's welfare over and above the 
wages paid on the one hand, or the service rendered on 
the other. The final goal is not parental government, 
nor socialism, nor communism, nor trades-unions, but 
co-operation. This will not be accomplished primarily 
by legislation, but it will be begun here and there by 
enlightened men of comprehensive and liberal views, 
who understand that good workmen must be the allies 
of their employers. A writer from that part of the 
country which we call The West — evidently a proprietor 



204 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and influential director of railroad management, sent a 
letter to a distinguished journal, setting forth in a clear 
and forcible way that owners, directors and managers 
of railroads should adopt some method of helping their 
workmen, outside the duties for which they are paid, in 
their private lives. He is a man of experience and 
ability. His view I will not discuss; it is the spirit of 
it that I notice. It is the appearance of the moral 
element in political economy which, until recently, has 
been alto^-ether ignored. Such movements will <jet 
into form after a while. All intelli<T;ent and thoughtful 
men should inform themselves on these things, and 
know what is being done, and with what success. It 
is, according to my way of thinking and feeling, one of 
the most interesting and important subjects that our 
modern society presents. If intelligent and wise men 
do not take it up, passionate and ignorant men will. 
Men who can only feel a wrong need to be guided by 
those who can see it. If there is anything in the 
future that seems to me certain in the unfolding of 
principles, it is that labor and capital can never settle 
down on the old bare political-economy proposition of 
demand and supply. The matter can never rest, so it 
seems to me, save on terms of mutual moral support. 
In the mean time, the man who talks only to human 
passions, who talks carelessly about the rights of prop- 
erty, and only disturbs men where they are, before they 
can do better, is a moral incendiary, and deserves con- 
dign punishment. — Rev. Horatio Stebbins. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 205 



THE REARING OF CHILDREN. 

188. There can be no doubt that the gradual 
impairment and loss of parental authority and influence 
is one of the most serious and momentous evils which 
beset the American civilization. It undermines the 
very foundations of the family — the essential unit of 
society. — Prof. John LeConte. 

189. Our mortuary reports show that about forty 
per cent, of our children die before they attain their 
fifth year. If stock-raisers were no more successful in 
rearing brutes than parents are in raising children, they 
would soon become bankrupt. If beautiful and healthy 
children at the age of fifteen years should command a 
high money premium from society or the State, or if 
families rearing children without loss, and at the same 
time possessing health and beauty, should be entitled to 
honors and pecuniary rewards, it is very probable that 
the present system of slaughtering children would 
not long continue. A money consideration would 
prompt the discovery of laws and lead to the adoption 
of proper food, clothing, exercise, and habits favoring 
health, development, symmetry of form, beauty of fea- 
ture, and longevity. Great is the Almighty Dollar! 

— Gen. John A. Collms. 

190. Let no woman dare invoke an immortal life 
until she feels herself worthy to develop it and lead it 
forth into all its appointed good. Let her never enter 



20G CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

that "holy of hohes" — the confidence of the young 
heart that has been nurtured beneath her own — without 
trying- herself, whether she be worthy of that high pre- 
rogative; without a tender, deep and prayerful deter- 
mination to make this one duty paramount to all others, 
so that she may invest maternity with that divine intelli- 
gence that can instruct, with that beautiful love which 
can teel no sacrifice, with that sweet forbearance which 
knows no impatience, with that sublime devotion which 
can make even suffering itself a joy. — Gen. John A. 
Collins. 

191. The minds of children, like their bodies, can 
safely bear but a limited amount of exercise. During 
the tender years, mental as well as physical culture 
should partake more of the character of amusement 
than of labor. Physical weakness, retarded and stunted 
growth, and deformity, are common among the factory 
children of Europe. Nervous irritability, dyspepsia, 
stunted and imbecile minds, are among the youth of 
our American schools. Men whose frames have attained 
their natural growth, whose bones are matured and 
hardened, complain, protest, and rebel against ten hours' 
daily labor, as being too much and too long for health- 
ful endurance ; and yet we confine our children in 
schools from five to six hours daily, and then many of 
the lessons must be acquired out of school. This is an 
outrage upon our youth, and downright robbery of the 
coming generations of their rightful physical strength, 
and mental and moral powers. No pupil under four- 
teen should be allowed, under ordinary circumstances. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 207 

to take home a book from the school room. There 
are always a gifted few who possess enormous capacity 
for endurance and study, but to make the ability 
of these the standard, is unwise and unjust. Our 
youth have something to learn besides abstract mental 
studies. The heart, or morals and manners, as well as 
mind, demand culture, expansion, pruning and direction. 

— Gen. John A. Collins. 

192. Parents commit a sad and almost remediless 
error when they bring up their children in bookless, 
pictureless homes. A forlorn looking house, with dusty 
grain fields sweeping to the very door, no orchard or 
garden, no picturesque porches or balconies, is not apt 
to be very clear to the memories of after years. It does 
not take much money to brighten home, but it does 
take patience and forethought. A few books of per- 
manent value — the master-pieces of English literature; 
a few engravings of pure outline and refined beauty, 
which shall daily refine the children's faces ; a few 
papers of good morals and practical ability; a bit of 
color here, a home-made bracket there, an air of neat- 
ness everywhere — are these costly requirements ^ In 
this age of toil, ambition, and wealth-getting, we can- 
not too strongly emphasize the fact that it is not suffi- 
cient for a man to feed, clothe, and technically educate 
his children. He must forge links to bind their hearts 
to the paternal acres and to the family calling: gardens, 
shrubberies, clinging vines, pictures, low voices of lov- 
ing parents — these shall far out-bid the attractions of 
saloons, billiard tables, races, and licentiousness. Your 

14 



208 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

sons, under proper home-influences, shall become sinewy 
and truth loving, your daughters fair and stately; their 
names shall be unsullied, and their lives sweet and 
rare. — Cha7des H. Shinn. 



FREEDOM. 

193. Freedom is, and ever must be while the earth 
turns round, mankind's inalienable inheritance, and 
manhood's strength and pride and glory. Her snowy 
raiment has oft been stained with blood. Her mild, 
sweet eyes have kindled with frenzy; her hymn of de- 
liverence has mingled with the wild scream of 
plasphemy, the howl of livid fury and infernal hate, 
but she is still an angel of more than mortal light and 
beauty to the nations. To win her recognition and re- 
ceive her benediction humanity, from immemorial ages; 
has wandered in burning sandy deserts, climbed with 
bleeding feet the rocky gorge and flinty mountain, 
endured the pangs of hunger and the agonies of thirst, 
borne the blast of the merciless hurricane, the whirl- 
wind of pitiless fire. Our country had nobility stamped 
upon its origin ! It sprang into luminous being from 
the throes of a bloody revolution, with the deathless, 
thrillinsf word of Freedom blazoned on her shinine 
forehead — Freedom, whose every look was wisdom, 
whose every word was love. Won by ancestors, whose 
thought by day and dream by night, was freedom , 
whose only august alternative was death ! Our country! 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 209 

with an outlook of promise, grander than which never 
bewildered the eye of fancy; with a destiny so peerless 
that the reckless enthusiast, urged he never so wildly 
the steeds of thought, might never hope to reach its 
ultimate development or attain its final grandeur, when 
in consummate perfection with the realization of all its 
extrinsic and intrinsic possibilities it shall present itself 
to the muse of history as the grandest government 
ever witnessed by humanity, the strongest and happiest 
republic built by man, feared by tyrants, and blessed 
by God. — Dr. J, Campbell Shorb. 

194. Often has the death of freedom been fore- 
told, and her grave prepared. Once and again has 
despotism sat down, amidst the pomp and glare of vic- 
tory, to write her epitaph. Prostrate upon the bloody 
field, her foes have mistaken her trance of agon}- for 
the pangs of dissolution. But now she has leaped from 
the dust, called her warriors to battle, bared her shining 
blade to the foe, and shouting at the head of her 
charging columns, she has converted the dark hour of 
her fancied extinction into the dawn of an immortal day. 
Such were the days of Marathon and Thermopylce; and 
the preservation of freedom is as much more glorious 
now than then as American liberty in the nineteenth 
century is superior to the tumultuous democracy of 
Athens, or the cruel and gloomy republicanism of 
Rome. No, Freedom cannot die. She may be pros- 
trated upon a hundred fields of blood, but she will rise 
crowned with light and radiant with immortality. 

— George Bar stow. 



2.10 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY, 

195. Long years ago, I took my stand by Free- 
dom, and where in youth my feet were planted, there 
my manhood and my age shall march. And, for one, 
I am not ashamed of Freedom. I know her power; 
I rejoice in her majesty; I walk beneath her banner; 
I glory in her strength. I have seen her again and 
again struck down on a hundred chosen fields of battle ; 
I have seen her friends fly from her ; I have 
seen her foes gather around her; I have seen 
them bind her to the stake ; I * have seen them give 
her ashes to the winds, regathering them that they 
might scatter them yet more widely; but when they 
turned to exult, I have seen her again meet them, face 
to face, clad in complete steel, and brandishing in her 
strong rieht hand a flamins: sword, red with insuffera- 
ble liofht. — Gcji. E. D. Baker. 

196. Again, forth from the wrecks of empire, amid 
tumbling thrones and tottering dynasties (as the Ac- 
anthus bursts in bloom and beauty from the ruins of 
Egyptian graves) rises man, the lord vicarious of 
earth, proud and imposing in the majesty of manhood. 
Again Freedom stalks above the mountain tops, sing- 
ing her song of triumph and brandishing her flaming 
spear. So strode the daughter of Jeptha, as she ad- 
vanced unto the sacrifice; so sang Deborah, as she 
chanted the conquests of her people; so flamed the 
sword of Judith, red with the blood of Holofernes. 

— Jos. IV. IVinans. 

197. They WHO look upon Liberty as having ac- 
complished her mission, when she has abolished heredi- 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 211 

tary privileges and given men the ballot, who think of 
her as having no further relations to the every-day 
affai/s of life, have not seen her real grandeur — to them 
the poets who have sung of her must seem rhapsodists, 
and her martyrs fools ! As the sun is the lord of life, 
as well as of light, as his beams not merely pierce the 
clouds, but support all growth, sujjply all motion, and 
call forth from what would otherwise be a cold and inert 
mass, all the infinite diversities of being and beauty, so 
is liberty to mankind. It is not for an abstraction that 
men have toiled and died; that in every age the wit- 
nesses of- liberty have stood forth, and the martyrs of 
liberty have suffered. It was for more than this that 
matrons handed the Queen Anne musket from its rest, 
and that maids bid their lovers q-q to death ! 

We speak of liberty as one thing, and of virtue, 
wealth, knowledo^e, invention, national strenofth and 
national independence as other things. But, of all 
these, Liberty is the source, the mother, the necessary 
condition. She is to virtue what light is to color, to 
wealth what sunshine is to c^rain, to knowledgfe what 
eyes are to the sight. She is the genius of invention, 
the brawn of national strength, the spirit of national 
independence ! Where Liberty rises, there virtue 
grows, wealth increases, knowledge expands, invention 
multiplies human powers, and in strength and spirit the 
freer nation rises among her neighbors as Saul amid his 
brethren — taller and fairer. Where liberty sinks, there 
virtue fades, wealth diminishes, knowledge is forgotten, 
invention ceases, and empires, once mighty in arms 



212 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and arts, become a helpless prey to freer barbarians. 

— Henry George. 

198. Americans, In their excusable pride ancF en- 
thusiasm, are often prone to claim for themselves 
solely, the glory of having first enunciated, in distinct 
form, those grand maxims and principles which consti- 
tute the chief corner-stone of our temple of freedom. 
We forget that, under a great law of nature, nothing 
seems to be created and perfected at the same time. 
The great globe on which we stand — this broad and 
beautiful earth — was, in the beginning, without form, 
and void. After it took up its grand march, to the 
music of the spheres, around the blazing pivotal sun, 
thousands and thousands of ages passed away before 
it emerged from its primeval state of chaos, and gradu- 
ally became prepared for the purposes designed by its 
great Creator — crested with mountains, silvered with 
oceans, shadowed by forests, gilded and spangled with 
flowers, and finally consecrated by the presence of God- 
like man. 

The homely fragment of carbon lay, rude and neg- 
lected, in the hidden gorges of Golconda, for myriads 
of centuries before the magic influences of time endowed 
it with that lustrous radiance which adds splendor to 
the most gorgeous diadem of royalty, and which the 
brilliancy of Beauty's eye alone exceeds. 

Countless centuries have passed away since, on the 
sanded floors of the ocean, were laid the first founda- 
tions of those coral-islands, which have risen proudly 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 213 

above the dashing wave, and gleam in their velvet 
verdure, like stars on the breast of the sea. 

So, in like manner, wc are to look far beyond the 
Fourth day of July, 1776, for the primitive sources of 
those sacred sentiments and principles which, like mul- 
titudinous rivulets gathering from far distant mountain 
peaks, have converged, and at length united in one 
noble, generous, broad-rushing stream, that gives life 
and happiness to all the dwellers in the land. 

From Palestine, from Greece and from Rome, from 
Germany, France and from England, have descended 
to us through centuries, the chief axioms of liberty, 
and many of the weapons of its defence. Chiefly, 
however, to our mother-land, we owe a debt of gratitude 
for a great share of our immunities as freemen ; she 
gave to us the Magna Charta, the right of trial by jury, 
the writ of Habeas Corpus, and the guarantees of re- 
ligious liberty. And though the mother and daughter, 
subsequently quarreling about matters of taxation and 
representation, dissolved their political connections and 
became permanently separated, yet no candid and lib- 
eral mind will deny, that we owe a very large share of 
our inestimable civil and religious privileges, to that 
sturdy and imperishable love of freedom and hatred of 
tyranny, which have ever been a marked feature of the 
English character, and which have descended to us on 
the western shore of the Atlantic. 

Jefferson, in writing the Declaration of Independence, 
drew his inspiration from these various sources ; the 
wise and patriotic statesmen who assembled to frame 



214 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

the Constitution of the United States, found no higher 
or purer springs at which to slake their quenchless 
thirst for freedom. While we scan the luminous records 
of the past, and glorify the names of the fathers of the 
Republic, let us not, in thoughdess selfishness, forget 
the services rendered to us, in common with the rest of 
mankind, by the patriots, soldiers and sages of genera- 
tions long departed. 

The Constitution of the United States may aptly be 
compared to a grand and mighty temple, built of the 
rarest and choicest materials, collected and preserved 
by the heroes of the human race through all the ages 
of the world's history, and handed down to our fathers 
for the benefit of themselves and their posterity for- 
ever. While we praise the architects who composed 
the edifice, and exhaust panegyric in expressing our 
admiration of their skill and fidelity, we must not for- 
get the long train of immortal co-laborers, who, from 
the distant realms of Time, brought column and archi- 
trave, cornice and spire and firm foundation stone, to 
aid us in the erection of a fabric that should defy the 
corroding tooth of age, the earthquake shock of civil 
commotion, the thunder bolts of foreign invasion, the 
silent but fatal influences of human corruption and 
degeneracy, and become the eternal abiding-place of 
the spirit of liberty; a fabric beneath whose broad and 
hospitable roof all the warring and diverse nations of 
Europe might find shelter and peace ; amid whose 
stately corridors and spacious aisles, beneath whose 
majestic domes, the humblest citizen and the proudest 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 215 

dignitary should find their legal and political rights held 
in exact equipoise. — Jtidgc E. C. Winchell. 

199. Popular sovereignty, in some shape or other, 
lies at the foundation of all free governments. Whether 
a constitution is written or traditional, wherever free 
government obtains, it must rest upon that great basis; 
that must be the bed-rock, below which you cannot go. 
All the expressions upon that subject which men be- 
lieve in and love in any country, emanate from that 
point — the right of self-government, the power in the 
people to regulate and control their own domestic af- 
fairs, limited by or manifested through constitutional 
provisions or legislative enactments — expressions more 
or less deliberate of the popular will. The American 
people have shown their love of this doctrine from the 
time of the Revolution down to this day. We derived 
the idea from the land far across the waves, and from the 
ages in which such men as Hampden and Russell and 
Sydney, the patriots and warriors and martyrs of that 
faith, struggled for it on the field of battle, pined for it 
in the dungeon, or bled for it on the scaffold. Are you 
a German? Is not the idea of universal personal inde- 
pendence a favorite of yours.-* Whether ruled by a 
duke or a monarch, still the idea of personal liberty is 
dear to the German heart. So with the Frenchman. 
Whether fighting under a despot in Italy, or barricad- 
ing the streets of Paris during a revolution, he loves 
the idea of personal liberty, and it is equally present in 
his heart. So with the Enfjlishman. Dear to him are 
the recollections of the great English Revolution of 



216 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

1688. Proudly and affectionately he recalls the time 
when Cromwell and his psalm-singing Ironsides ar- 
rayed themselves against the hosts of a treacherous 
sovereign, and dragged him ignominiously to the block 
because he attacked the great principles of popular 
rights and personal liberty. Who ever heard of any 
man reciting a poem to slavery? But if you want the 
noblest and most inspiring poems, save those from 
heaven, read Milton, read Shelley, read Homer, read 
Halleck, read Bryant, above all, read Shakespeare. 
There are poets who sell themselves with venal spirit 
to fatten in the atmosphere of Courts; but even they, 
seduced by the pomp and brilliancy of fashion, cannot 
break into praise of slavery. They may praise the 
despot himself, but the iniquity of slavish servitude they 
dare not crown with poetry. The hauteur of the poet 
will not allow it, and his hand trembles, falters, and is 
palsied ere he attempts to sweep it in such praise across 
the lyre of song. But when you talk to him of Free- 
dom, his lip quivers with inspiration, his heart glows, 
and his numbers break out as the stream dashes from 
the mountain top to seek the vale below — bright, clear, 
sparkling, free. And are you ashamed to march In 
that procession? Shall reproach, shall malignant slan- 
der, shall base misrepresentation make you hesitate? 
For mc, at least, no. A thousand times, no! I love 
freedom better than slavery. I will speak her words, 
I will listen to her music, I will acknowledofe her im- 
pulses, I will stand beneath her flag, I will fight in her 
ranks, and when I do so, I shall find myself surrounded 
by the great, the wise, the good, the brave, the noble — 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 217 

the noble of every land. If I could stand for a mo- 
ment upon one of our high mountain-tops, far above 
all the kingdoms of the world, and see coming up, one 
after another, the bravest and the wisest of the ancient 
warriors, and statesmen and kings, and monarchs, and 
priests, and be permitted to ask their opinion on this 
theme, with a common voice, and in thundertones, re- 
verberating through all lands and echoing down the 
ages, they would cry, "Liberty, Freedom, the Univer- 
sal Brotherhood of Man." I join in that shout; I swell 
that anthem; I echo that cry forever and forever. 

— Gen. E. D. Baker. 



WAR. 

200. War never brings unmitigated evil. When 
a nation has grown puerile in the lap of peace, it revivi- 
fies its torpid dust and rekindles its martial fire at the 
bloody shrine of war. Even degenerate sons, goaded 
by shame at witnessing the degradation of their coun- 
try, arouse themselves at last and draw the swords of 
their fathers. Bad as war is, there is one thing worse 
— it is that depth of moral degradation which a nation 
reaches when it considers that it has nothing worth 
fighting for. — George Bar stow. 

■ 201. What shall be said of those conflicts that 
shatter empires — the civil contests that deluge mighty 
States with blood ? Viewed as isolated phenomena, 
they appear to be pure scourges — the incarnate wrath 



218 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of God, smiting sinful man. But could we trace events 
to their germinal cause and ultimate results, might we 
not discover that wars are normal forces moving along 
the track of progress ? May they not have their ap- 
propriate place and office in the evolution of humanity, 
from the primitive to the perfected state ? May they 
not be looked upon as curative rather than destructive 
agencies — Nature's heroic method of expelling disorder 
from the social system ? May they not perform the 
same office for the State that the surgeon's knife per- 
forms for the individual stricken with a consuming 
ulcer ? The knife is not an instrument of death, but 
an instrument of science; it is guided, not by a cruel, 
but a merciful hand. Its office is not to kill, but to 
cure — not to destroy, but to save. The blood flows, the 
frame is racked by torture, but the patient is saved. 

— Samuel Williams. 

202. The great enemy of commerce, and, indeed, 
of the human race, is War. Sometimes ennobling to 
individuals and nations, it is more frequently the off- 
spring of a narrow nationality and inveterate prejudice. 
If it enlists in its service some of the noblest qualities 
of the human heart, it too often perverts them to the 
service of a despot. From the earliest ages a chain of 
mountains, or a line of a river, made men strangers, if 
not enemies. Whatever, therefore, opens communica- 
tion, and creates interchange of ideas, counteracts the 
sanguinary tendencies of mankind, and does its part to 
" beat the sword into the plowshare." — Gen. E. D. 
Baker. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 219 

203. It seems strange that in the economy of 
Providence, war should have been permitted — stranger 
yet that it should have been made the means of human 
progress. But He who ordained that physical man- 
hood should be attained by hard contact with external 
things — that strength of character must come by strug- 
gling with difficulties, and that moral excellence must 
be the result of triumph over vice, also ordained that 
nations must be baptized in the fires of war before they 
can wear the crown of national glory. Wars have 
their hopes and their gains, their debits and their 
credits. The losses fall heaviest upon the immediate 
generations, the greatest gains belong to generations to 
come — often their ever-increasing heritage. Instance 
the American Revolution. Who would strike its 
bloody, glorious chapters from history now ? How 
infinitely do the gains preponderate over the losses ! 
See the balance-sheet ! Debit, eight years of war, 
cruel, merciless, with sufferings and hardships unparal- 
leled ; debit, thousands of lives, millions of dollars in 
property; debit, homes destroyed, families severed; de- 
bit, the cruelties of the cow boys, the murder of inno- 
cents, the massacre of Wyoming, the treachery of 
Arnold; debit a land steeped to the lips in poverty. 
Credit, American Independence, credit the Federal 
Union, credit the Constitution; credit a material ad- 
vancement unheard of before; credit the inventions in 
mechanics, the discoveries in science, great names in 
literature; credit an impulse to civil liberty throughout 
the world ; credit the idea that while Emperors and 
Kings are dividing and partitioning Europe, this conti- 



220 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

nent shall belong to the people, and they shall possess 
it forever. Credit Washington! and If the Revolution 
had only served to reveal that name in the brightness 
of its glory — name among all men and races and ages, 
most loved, most honored, most revered — its blood 
would not have been shed in vain. There is nothing 
that consumes, wastes, destroys, like an army. War is 
a ofrcat maelstrom that draws into its vortex that which 
is near, and whose eddies and currents disturb the 
waters of the farthest sea. But there is a deeper, ten- 
derer, sadder loss, that figures cannot represent or im- 
agination conceive, the heart can only bleed over it — 
the loss of precious, noble lives. And such lives— the 
brave, the daring, the manly, the self-sacrificing. Nations 
mourn the fall of the gifted, and history enshrines their 
names in their annals; but the humble, the lowly, 
though brave and good, have fallen by tens of thous- 
ands, not alone on the field of battle and of glory, 
where there are shoutings of the captains, the thunder 
of artillery, and all the pomp and pride of war, but in 
the sickly camp, the crowded hospital, in the noisome 
prison — they lie in indiscriminate trenches and in name- 
less graves, where not even the tear of love can mark 
their resting place. — Newton Booth. 



OUR COUNTRY. 

204. American Patriotism. — We walk the earth 
at mid-day, and the vast expanse of the blue heavens 
appears unrelieved by the sparkle of a single star. Our 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 221 

world seems to be the lonely satrap of space, chained 
to the fiery chariot of the mighty sun. And yet we 
know that Mars still holds his course; that Venus still 
whirls through space; that Saturn circles amid his shin- 
ing rings; that Jupiter and Uranus are flashing on the 
confines of lic^ht; that the blazinof belt of Orion and 
the guiding gleam of the North Star are all there; and 
that when the centrifuijal force of the earth shall whirl 
us again into the presence of night, we shall again be- 
hold our companion worlds, as they journey in shining 
splendor upon their eternal rounds. So, though we 
may not always be able to see the patriotism, the honor 
and the free spirit of the American people, we know 
they exist, and that when the hour comes, we shall 
see them once more arrayed in majesty, in beauty and 
in power. — Thomas Fitch. 

206. Government. — As yet the American mind 
governs the American continent, and its most powerful 
instinct is to appeal to law for the redress of private 
wrong, and to the ballot for the reform of public griev- 
ances. No government can be better than the people, 
or, for any long period of time, worse than the people. 
The world is governed too much by remote and cen- 
tralized power. Minute local administration is always 
purest and wisest. To thoughtful men the govern- 
ments of the world seem to be growing better, because 
they govern less. — Edward C. Marshall. 

206. What is our Country? — It is not the land 
and the sea, the river and the mountain, the people, 
their history and laws. It is something more than all 



222 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

these. It is a bright ideal, a living presence in the 
heart, whose destruction would rob the earth of beauty, 
the stars of their glory, the sun of its brightness, life of 
its sweetness, love of its joy. My countrymen! cherish 
this ideal. It will exalt you, as you exalt it. Make it 
your cloud by day, your pillar of fire by night. Follow 
where it leads. Enlarge your horizon. Take counsel 
of the dead. No martyr ever died in the conflict of 
ideas, which is one of the conditions of human pro- 
gress, but pleads for the cause consecrated by his blood. 
Strive to pierce the future. Listen to the footfall of 
coming generations. No child to be born on earth 
but has an interest in the cause of liberty and equality. 
Rise to the hight of a great occasion. Hear the voice 
of the ages. Take your reckoning by the stars. Then 
choose. — Newton Booth. 

207. You MAY SEARCH through the volume of his- 
tory, you may study closely, and analyze the charater- 
istics of nations that have passed away, yet of none 
will you find greater attributes, nobler powers, or deep- 
er capacities than those which surround, adorn and bless 
the American people. Nowhere else was there such a 
continent, nowhere else such an empire. Nowhere 
else is nature so bountiful, holding such stores of agri- 
cultural and mineral resources. Nowhere else has there 
been made such progress in the sciences and in all that 
benefits the human race. — Milton S. Latham. 

208. Though neither a zealot nor a dreamer, I 
have an abiding faith in the fortunes of my country. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 223 

Could I Stand like a rev^elator, and gaze upward through 
the grand visions of the political Apocalypse; could I 
behold the opening of seal upon seal, and the revelation 
of glory upon glory, disclosing the future of the nations 
in a prospect more gorgeous than that which the 
tempter spread before the Son of Man, I would ascribe 
all the splendor of the scene to the origin, the progress, 
the grandeur and the destiny of these United States. 

— Joseph IV. Winans. 

209. One Essential to National Life. — It will 
be well for us to ask ourselves the question, and answer 
it honestly and frankly, whether our unprecedented 
material progress has not in a great measure over- 
shadowed our moral and intellectual advancement — 
whether the sea of material prosperity in which, despite 
occasional squalls, we continue to float buoyantly and 
hopefully, does not threaten completely to engulph those 
moral and intellectual qualities without which a nation 
cannot long sustain its position and independence. We 
care not to reply to these interrogatories ; they are 
fraught with painful considerations. But we will sug- 
gest that when ingratitude corrupts the moral heart of 
a people, patriotism is on the decline; and when patri- 
otism ceases to exist, dissension, treachery, and ruin 
soon follow. The name of Samuel Adams is scarcely 
known among us to-day, and the memory of our glori- 
ous Washington seems to inspire us with little gratitude. 
It will be well for reflective people to ponder on these 
things. — T. W. Frcclon. 

15 



224 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

210. "A Fair Vestal Throned by the West." 
— The sayings 5f the wise have oftentimes a reach be- 
yond their common meaning-. When the dying Web- 
ster exclaimed, "I still live," he only meant to indicate 
that life still lluttered in his veins; but the words had 
a higher force, and symbolized the immortality of his 
renown. And so, when Shakespeare spoke of "A 
Fair Vestal Throned by the West," he simply meant to 
eulogize Elizabeth, the .queenly ruler of earth's proudest 
realm; but a prophetic meaning gathered in those 
words, which, stretching to the future, heralded another, 
mightier than Elizabeth, even the Goddess of Liberty 
herself, seated on a continent and lifting her head above 
the stars, and before whose majesty all nations were 
to bow. — yos. W. Winans. 

211. Patriotic Devotion. — I yield to no man in 
devotion to our common country. I love the North, 
because the blood of my paternal ancestors watered her 
soil, and beneath her green sod their bones now moulder. 
I love her for the good and great, the mighty dead, 
who once trod her ways. I love her for the good and 
true men who are within her borders — those men of 
whom it has been well said, that their loins are strong 
enough and their shoulders broad enough to bear the 
load of principle ; men who have the earnestness to 
seek the right, and the moral courage to follow their 
convictions ; attempting to direct, and not drifting with 
the tide of public sentiment ; who, despite the tiger 
stare of ignorance, unmoved by the rending roar of 
the lion of fanaticism, heedless of the hungry howl of 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 225 

the wolves of faction, battle not for Southern rights, 
battle not for Northern rights, but battle that each and 
all may have their share of the universal right which is 
broader than the universe and deeper than the sea. I 
love the West because it is the land of my adoption. 
I love her because amid her golden hills and her pacific 
shore the years of my early manhood have glided into 
the past. I love her because those flowers of friend- 
ship which only flourish in the spring and summer of 
life, for me have bloomed and blossomed here. I love 
the South because she is the land of my birth. I love 
her responsive to a sentiment which finds echo in every 
true bosom. I love her as a man should love his 
mother. — R. D. Crittenden. 

212. Commemorative Days. — It is a great thing for 
a nation to have a heroic past. There is hope of im- 
becile and lawless Greece, so Ions: as the names of 
Salamis, Thermopylae and Marathon are spoken among 
her mountains and by the sea. The golden age of Rome 
has been a perpetual and keen reproach to the degene- 
rate Italian heart, and made possible a united Italy. 
The Alpine passes are kept forever against the foot of 
tyranny by the spirit of the patriot Tell; and all the 
Scottish hills are hallowed by. the memory of the Bruce 
of Bannockburn. Indeed such names and such memo- 
ries cease to be national. They become the heritage 
of humanity, and are quickeners to brave deeds and 
illustrious lives among all peoples. It is therefore wise 
and good to keep alive by monument and festival, and 
speech and song, by any memorial device, those pas- 



226 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

sages of a nation's story in which she moves and acts 
in the highest and noblest strain. It is not enough to 
write them down on the pages of their annals, for 
scholars to read amid the quiet of their books. They 
should be rehearsed before popular assemblies, made 
visible and vocal to the popular eye and heart, be re-en- 
acted as in a living drama, and press their moulding in- 
fluence upon the whole current life of the people. It 
is especially needful for us in this land, that we keep com- 
memorative days, for we are on such a swift and hurry- 
ing tide — we drift so rapidly on to the new — fresh issues 
are continually calling to us out of the future — we rush 
forward with headlong eagerness to seize more splendid 
prizes — we have no time to look back — we cannot call 
a halt in our career to estimate the cost of what we 
have gained, and pay our reverent and grateful debt 
to the past. — Rev. Dr. A. L. Stone. 

213. No North, no South. — I know no distinc- 
tion between North and South, in the just and legal 
enforcement of the laws. I believe in the Constitution 
of the United States, and by the compact which our 
fathers made I am willing to stand to the death. With 
the institutions of the South I have nothing to do (A. 
D, 1 86 1 — Editor.) They are local in their character, 
and there let them remain. But I was reared in a State 
which was consecrated to liberty long before the corner- 
stone of the Republic was laid; whose free soil, un- 
polluted by a bondsman's tread, nurtured a happy and 
independent people. Then be not surprised if, having 
been reared amonc: the free, I feel no o^reat admiration 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 227 

for the political system which would condemn the 
meanest of God's creatures to hopeless and endless 
captivity. If God in his wisdom has doomed this 
nation to destruction — if her mission is fulfilled and 
her glory is to pass away— let the throes of her disso- 
lution resemble the agony of her birth, and as she was 
born, so let her expire: amidst the shock of conflicting 
armies, the roar of battle, the thunder of cannon, and 
the groans of the dying. Let her live no longer, a cheat 
and a lie, to deceive mankind with false beacons of 
freedom. Let her punishment be an example so terri- 
ble that posterity, for a thousand years to come, shall 
tremble at the story of her ruin. If man cannot ap- 
preciate the blessings of freedom and learn the secret 
of governing himself let her name be blotted out from 
the nations of the earth, and the smoke of her expiring 
fires darken the broad heavens like the folds of a fun- 
eral pall. But this extremity has not yet come. High 
above the dark clouds of war I see the sweet vistas of 
peace — peace purchased, perhaps, on the blood-stained 
battle-field, but which will endure when the conflict is 
past, and the cries of the combatants are hushed in the 
stillness of death. — J . H. Warwick. 

214. A Permanent Union. — When we think what 
men builded these structures (the several States of the 
Union); when we think what principles cement them; 
when we think what blood bought and protected them, 
we feel that there is but one power on this earth that 
can dissolve the American Union. And what is that 
power? It is the will of the whole American people. 



228 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Until that mighty fiat goes forth the Union will never 
be dissolved, unless this great globe itself and all upon 
it shall also be dissolved. Those living forms of our 
liberties, the American Union and American Constitu- 
tion, will not perish from the earth. Spirits that live 
throughout, vital in every part, cannot but by annihila- 
tion die. Our flag is the flower of our nationality — 
there is not a thread in it which has not been bought 
and drenched by the blood of the first races of the 
world. To the millions of the Old World, in their 
deepest gloom, it gleams in the Western sky like a star 
of hope. The exile from the banks of the Rhine, from 
the sunny Garonne, and from the broad Shannon, sits 
down under its ample folds for protection, and perchance 
hoists beneath it the trampled emblem of his own 
nationality, and looks upon it with joy and pride. It 
is the sign, ihe seal, the symbol, the pledge, the bond 
of our nationality. May that flag and nationality be 
eternal. We Californians are in a land of which Allen 
and Putnam never heard, and over which the wildest 
visionaries of those early days never dreamed that 
our eagles would soar, but though remote we are not 
indifferent. I am an American citizen. The first lesson 
which my dawning reason learned from the lips of a 
patriot father, was that there was no title which any 
rank or order, or class, in any country, could give me, 
prouder than that of an American Citizen. The enthu- 
siasm of my youth, and the judgment and experience 
of my manhood, have confirmed that truth, and I will 
never surrender that proud title that I may decline 
upon any paltry provincial appellation. — Eugene Casserly. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 220 

215. Recuperative Power of the Nation. — The 
mission of the Pioneer has well nigh ended. He has 
nowhere to retreat beyond the companionship of his 
fellows or the far stretching antennae of a zeal which 
reaches him, and holds him, and civilizes him, whether 
he will or no. He has no more solitudes to conquer. 
Faster and faster upon his retiring footsteps the massed 
columns of enterprise and capital have advanced, and 
made his most secret haunts their abiding place. The 
deserts no longer protect him; the mountains give him 
no shelter. The vast plains that since primeval hours 
had borne little more than impressions of sweeping 
clouds, that shut out the sunshine from their mighty 
desolation, have trembled and been burdened with the 
hurrying vanguard of the commerce of Occident and 
Orient; and the White Death that sat upon the brow 
of the Sierras has been transmuted into glowing life by 
the irresistible touch of the gods of steam and electri- 
city. Far to the north, peaceful acquisitions of territory 
have increased the nation's three millions of square 
miles to hundreds of thousands more. Thirty millions 
of people have increased to more than forty millions; 
and the sun, as he throws his benignant smiles from 
ocean to ocean, from the poles to the tropic savannahs, 
does not behold the unrewarded toil of a single slave, 
or see the face of one not rich in hope. Upon the 
surface of this momentous progression, the Nation has 
endured and triumphed over the scourge of civil war. 
Cities have been burned to ashes. Almost whole States 
have been devastated, and apparently left to the hor- 
rors of a lingering decay ; and all industries and arts 



230 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of peace have seemed at times unsettled and paralyzed 
by the anxieties and uncertainties of the most terrible 
of intestine dissensions. Even when the last battle 
had been fought and the last physical wound inflicted, 
it seemed as if generations must be born and buried 
before the nation's wounds would heal, and that it must 
always bear unsightly scars. Yet the impetus of pro- 
gress has been so universal and powerful, that no evils, 
real or anticipated, have materially checked the national 
growth. It hardly feels the five years of civil war. 
Our personal recollections almost fail to preserve a 
memory of its awful experiences. The occasional 
crippled veteran who solicits charity in the streets, or 
struggles bravely with a mutilated body to gain his 
poor livelihood ; or the social sympathies aroused by 
the sight of some widowed woman, or fatherless child, 
are almost our only reminders of the bloodiest and 
most desperate conflict the historian has ever had, or 
I believe ever will have, presented to his pen. The 
very States most harassed by the visible presence of 
war, still more embarrassed by the unsolved problem of 
free labor imposed upon a servile race, and the almost 
total destruction of commercial values, and, most of 
all, cursed in the effort to recuperate by a devouring 
and insatiable breed of political locusts — now yearly add 
to the nation's wealth more than they ever contributed 
in any one year of their former prosperity, and are 
solvent and financially secure. I am proud to recognize 
this fact, so much more calculated to exalt the prestige 
of the Southern name than the fearful prodigality with 
which it sacrificed millions of treasure and hecatombs 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 231 

of valuable lives in vindication of political ideas whose 
realization would have been their and our national 
extinction. The moral triumphs of the South have 
been g'reater and grander than any she could have won 
by prevailing over the national government. She has 
conquered herself; encountered and mastered the most 
serious social question of the century; and is success- 
fully moulding her opinions and shaping her destinies to 
meet the requirements of the great future in store for her. 
Whatever politicians may say — however the pressure 
of partisan necessity may seek to foster a spirit of dis- 
trust in the general political temper of the South, the 
people firmly believe that with the extinctiion of the 
causes of sectional dissension, with the abandonment 
of human slavery, and with the costly but not too dear 
results of the contest waged over the pestilential dogma 
of secession, there is securely established between 
North and South, and for the first time since the Con- 
vention of 1787, there exists that more perfect Union, 
which the Constitution, then adopted, sought to create. 
The chief dangers have passed aw^ay forever, and the 
evils which remain to be overcome are results, not 
causes; they diminish of themselves, day by day ; as 
after some mid-night tempest, the perturbed waves still 
rebellingly upheave the ocean's dark, unfathomable 
depths, but with an ever decreasing strength, and at 
last, their foamy crests no longer lifted, the horizon falls 
upon a high expanse, and the day dawns upon a limit- 
less and golden peace.— G^<?;27 W. H. L. Barnes. 

216. The Perfection of Human Wisdom. — Of 
this let the world be assured — that the project of 



232 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

American liberty was a bold one, conceived by gallant 
spirits, won by the stern determination of a band of 
heroes, the beneficial results of which can be meas- 
ured by no standpoint of human conception. And let 
the world understand this other fact — that it has cost 
too much of blood and treasure to be lightly sacrificed. 
Its accomplishment was the result of superhuman ex- 
ertion. For it, martyrs laid down their lives, and pat- 
riots gave themselves willing sacrifices. The blood of 
these martyrs is the seed of the church of universal 
liberty. Its accomplishment became a new fact in the 
history of empires, a new era in the history of the 
world. Civilization beheld the dawn of a newer and 
brighter day. Barbarism became involved in a darker 
and drearier night. Religion caught the mellow lustre 
of its reflected beauty. Science saw new revelations 
in its clearer light. Literature turned a new and a 
more glowing page. Poetry took a loftier flight. In- 
dustry became the handmaid of genius, and, bound in 
the golden chains of honored labor, the son of toil first 
took his true rank in the family of man. Roman and 
Grecian liberty was the sport and plaything of a refined 
and Utopian philosophy, the experiment of a highly cul- 
tivated age. It was the growth of a sun-shiny morn- 
ing in the world's history. It flourished while the dews 
of philosophy watered it, but when the storms of a 
sterner era, the tempest of internal faction, and the 
winds of foreign invasion beat upon it, it fell. American 
liberty was a real, practical and substantial achievement; 
its foundations were laid in the recognition of thcabso- 
lute right of all men to be regarded as equal — of the prin- 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 233 

ciplc that the government was founded for the benefit of 
all; that a majority of the people should, by a simple 
expression of their will throu;^h the ballot box, in the 
choice of law-makers and rulers, govern themselves. It 
was a wise scheme of government that our fathers con- 
ceived, because it Vv^as simple; it was a firm govern- \ 
ment, because it was planted in the rights and interests 
of all; it is destined to immortal perpetuity, because it 
is the perfection of human wisdom; it cannot fail, be- 
cause it is for the interest of the American people to 
sustain it. — F. M. Pixlcy. 

217. The American Revolution. — The sangui- 
nary record of the Revolution is engraved on every pat- 
riot heart. From her crumbling thrones and tottering 
dynasties Europe had gazed aghast upon the spectacle , 
of that young and giant race who, far av/ay upon 
another hemisphere, strangled the serpent in the cradle, 
and burst the bonds of tyranny; who grew invincible 
amid the power, and radiant amid the luster of free in- 
stitutions; who gave new impulses to science and the 
arts; and in their grand ambition had resolved to de- 
monstrate the freedom, the intelligence and the equality 
of universal man. The contest which ensued was not 
a mere warfare of opinion, not a simple struggle for 
supremacy, not alone a craving thirst for conquest, but 
that inevitable strife which from the becfinnincr had been 
fore-ordained between the independence of the people 
and the despotism of their rulers. In the sublime yet 
inscrutable design of the Omnipotent it was ordained 
that our era should be the time, our continent the thea- 



234 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

ter, our people the instrument of working out this 
mighty problem. And so the fathers trod the gory 
path, and bore the fierce ordeal, not for themselves 
alone, not alone for us, not for the glory of our country 
only, and the splendor of its unimaginable future, but 
that the scepter might be broken and the miter crushed ; 
that the exactions of tyranny and the spirit of intoler- 
ance might be resisted, until at last, in the long lapse of 
time and the grand sweep of revolution, the myriads of 
earth's benighted men, of every lineage and race and 
creed and clime, should emerge from the gloom of ages 
into the lambent light of civil and religious liberty. 
Well may we too rejoice, as our fathers did, and glory 
in that day which gave these priceless blessings to man- 
kind. 

The events which followed are like the marvels of a 
dream. Vast in increase, peerless in power, and lust- 
rous with intelligence, the land grew glorious among 
the nations. Hither came genius, which no more could 
kennel with the royal hounds. Hither invention, which 
grew chill beneath the throne; hither came all the 
energies of mind and thought, to radiate in the free air; 
hither came enterprise and talent, which had failed to 
thrive on the caprice of patronage. Up rose a stalwart 
race, the true nobility of nature. Up sprung an era 
more splendid than the age Augustan, more enlightened 
than the age of Pericles. Labor, by its right divine, 
became King. On white-winged navies Commerce 
swept the sea. Through every people and to ever)/ 
land, the prowess of our arms and the radiance of our 
institutions sped, diffusing universal influence and light. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 235 

The sword rested in its scabbard, and the arts and 
sciences usurped the lurid throne of war. — Joseph W. 
VVinans. 

218. The Surest Guaranty of our Perpetuity. 
— IntelHgcncc alone, however general, will not suffice 
to preserve our republican institutions. The love of 
morality and virtue, and an abiding respect for the 
ennobling principles inculcated by the precepts of 
Christianity, must be firmly rooted in the hearts of the 
people. The surest guaranty of the perpetuity of the 
American plan of self-government, lies in the incor- 
ruptible character of the mass of the citizens of this 
Republic. Exceptions to the general rule of integrity 
can be found in every community ; but these do not 
affect its substantial accuracy, for the great majority of 
American citizens, north, south, east and west, are, as 
yet, governed in their private lives, and in their political 
actions, by their honest convictions of what is just, 
right, equitable, and conducive to the common wel- 
fare; and thereby indicate a recognition of their moral 
accountability, to an Unseen and Overruling power. 
So lonir as these sentiments hold dominion in the hearts 
of our countrymen, our free institutions must exist in 
all their pristine purity and vigor. Corrupt, base and 
designing men will attain official station, but the nox- 
ious inliuences which exhale from their moral rottenness, 
will be neutralized by the active and imperishable prin- 
ciples of \irtue and truth, incarnate in the forms of 
honest, faithful and capable men, who are their col- 
leagues in duty. Even if it should happen, through 



23G CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

any inexplicable combination of circumstances, that the 
most, or all of the important official positions in the 
State and Nation, should be held by daring and unscru- 
pulous incumbents, defiant of God, and regardless of 
their fellow-men, the unshaken integrity and incorrupti- 
bility of the people would eventually thwart the lawless 
machinations of their unworthy rulers, and bring their 
crafty designs of personal aggrandizement, and public 
ruin, to a sure and ignominious end. 

If, on the other hand, a long and prosperous career, 
filling the land with wealth, luxury, ease, idleness, and 
vice, shall at last, slowly and inevitably, like a relentless 
cancer, eat out the vital virtues of the people, consuming 
their probity, integrity, honor and truth, destroying 
their love for, and pride in, their free institutions, and 
rendering them indifferent to all save their private 
schemes of selfish exaltation and criminal indulgence, 
the downfall of our republican fabric will speedily and 
certainly ensue. Rulers will grasp the reins of power, 
Vvho excel in flattery, mendacity, dishonesty, and wicked 
ambition. Unrestrained by any inward monitor, unawed 
by any fear of future retribution, unchecked by any 
protest from their negligent and deluded constituents, 
the constitutional bulwarks which confine their insatiable 
rapacity will be, stone by stone, turret by turret, bastion 
by bastion, easily broken down and trampled in th(i 
dust, and nothing will remain to shield those God- 
given rights, the lives, liberties and happiness of the 
people from capricious, cruel, iron despotism, 

— E. C. Winchell. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 237 

219. The Founders of our Government. — The 
science of government is the grandest, most imposing, 
and most profound that ever employed the genius of 
the statesman, the speculations of the philosopher, or 
the wisdom of the sage. Within its giant grasp are 
held the destinies of nations and the welfare of the race. 
Constituted as man is, and was from the beginning, a 
social being, incapable of self-direction, or even of 
sustaining his existence in isolation from his kind, it 
became no less essential to his safety than indispensable 
to his happiness that he should mingle in social com- 
munion with his fellow-men. For this, concessions must 
be made so far as needful, absolute rights renounced so 
far as inconsistent with the common crood. For this 

o 

the license of a state of nature must give place to the 
sanctions of social harmony and order. For this a 
systematic rule of action, now denominated law, must 
be established, and relative decjrees of subordination 
and authority must be created and enforced. First in 
order came the formation of families, clans, and tribes, 
and as these multiplied into nations, they resolved 
themselves into such forms of municipal combination 
as accident or choice, or the compulsion of their leaders 
might prescribe. Hence sprang the organization of 
States, Kingdoms and Empires, with their different 
systems of polity, authority and law. The compara- 
tive merits of these systems, and their imperfections, 
have been thoroughly investigated. From the earliest 
periods of history it has been the highest aim of human 
intellect to devise a perfect form of government, such 
as would best secure to the people the largest degree 



liOS CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of natural rii^hts consistent with the general welfare, 
which, while it advanced the true interests of the 
commonwealth, would equally promote the happiness 
and protect the liberty of the citizen or subject. P^or 
this Aristotle theorized and Plato mused — for this 
Cicero pondered and More dreamed. Yet the Politica 
were but the comparison of existing constitutions with 
an abstract possibility, the Republics of Plato and 
Cicero were perfectly ideal, and the Utopia, in its 
fanciful extravagance, surpassed the creations of ro- 
mantic fiction. These schemes were vague and vision- 
ary all^ — abstractions — rich in quaint conceits and 
philosophy, reared on a glowing but impracticable model. 
They conjure up a government surrounded with illusory 
magnificence, exhibiting an oriental splendor, and a 
mathematical precision, but needing one thing to 
complete it, that it should be formed of perfect men. But 
while the science of government has been rendered 
thus successful in theory by the speculations of philoso- 
phers, very different results have attended its practical 
development. For thousands of years the various 
communities of earth have struggled on through tur- 
bulence, vicissitude and change, now crushed by the 
tyranny of despots, now frantic with the license of the 
multitude, vexed with continuous collisions between the 
rulers and the ruled, wading oftentimes through 
slaughter to the triumphs of ambition or the overthrow 
of the oppressor, and merging into barbarism at the 
last, or lapsing into utter ruin and distinction. And 
thus, while every form of government has essayed and 
tested by severe experiment, from the extreme of Ab 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 239 

solutism to the dead level of a pure Democracy; none 
of these forms, save ours, has borne that test unscathed, 
or escaped universal wreck. The giant spirits that 
laid the foundations of our government, approved them- 
selves no less sacfacious in the cabinet than invincible 
in the field. They were bold and original in thought 
as in action. They repudiated all existing systems. 
They derived little aid from the schemes of philoso- 
phers, old or modern. They established Republican- 
ism, but not the Republicanism of any former era. 
They realized that philosophy must be the corner-stone 
of every good government, but yet that the govern- 
ment itself must be practically adapted to the nature of 
man, alike capable of sustaining his personal rights and 
advancing his social interests. Adaptation and devel- 
opment are the characteristic and controlling features of 
the noble product of their genius. — J^os. IV. Winans. 

220. "One and Inseparable." — As I take my leave 
of a subject upon which I have detained you too long 
(speech on State of the Country, in U. S. Senate, Jan. 
3, 1861 — Editor) I think in my mind whether I shall 
add anything, in my feeble way, to the hopes, the 
prayers, the aspirations that are going forth daily for the 
perpetuity of the Union of these States. I ask myself 
shall I add anything to that volume of invocation 
which is everywhere rising up to high heaven, " Spare 
us from the madness of disunion and civil war!" Stand- 
ing in this chamber and speaking upon this subject, I 
cannot forget that I am standing in a place once occu- 
pied by one far, far mightier than I, the lachet of whose 
16 



240 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

shoe I am unworthy to unloose. It was upon this 
subject of secession, of disunion, of discord, of civil 
war, that Webster uttered those immortal sentiments, 
clothed in immortal words, married to the noblest 
expressions that ever fell from human lips, which alone 
would have made him memorable and remembered 
forever. I cannot improve upon those expressions. 
They were uttered nearly thirty years ago, in the face 
of what was imagined to be a great danger, then hap- 
pily dissipated. They were uttered in the fullness of 
his genius, from the fullness of his heart. They have 
echoed since in millions of homes and in foreign lands. 
They have been a text-book In schools. They have 
been an inspiration to public hope and to public liberty. 
As I close, I repeat them, I adopt them. If in their 
presence I were to attempt to give utterance to any 
words of my own, I should feel that I ought to say, 

"And shall the lyre, so long divine. 
Degenerate into hands like mine 1 " 

I adopt the closing passages of that immortal speech; 
they are my sentiments ; they are the sentiments of 
every man upon this side of the chamber. I would 
fain believe they are the sentiments of every man upon 
this floor. I would fain believe that they are an inspi- 
ration, and will become a power throughout the length 
and breadth of this broad confederacy; that again the 
aspirations and hopes and prayers for the Union, may 
rise like a perpetual hymn of hope and praise. But, 
however, this may be, these thoughts are mine; and as, 
reverently and findly, I utter them, I leave the discus- 
sion: 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 241 

"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the 
last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining 
on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once 
glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, bel- 
ligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched it 
may be in fraternal blood ! Let their last feeble and 
lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of 
the Republic, now known and honored throughout the 
earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies 
streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or 
polluted, nor a single star obscured ; bearing for its 
motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all 
this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and 
folly, ' Liberty first, and Union afterwards,' but every- 
where, spread all over in characters of living light, blaz- 
ing on all its ample folds as they float over the sea and 
over the land and in every wind under the whole heav- 
ens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American 
heart, ' Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and 
inseparable.'" — Gen. E. D. Baker. 



HOW A GREAT PEOPLE PERISHED. 

221. In all the history of the past there is but one 
nation with which the great nation now growing up on 
this continent can be compared; but one people which 
has occupied the position and exercised the influence, 
which for good or evil, the American people must oc- 
cupy and exert. A nation which has left a deeper im- 
jDress upon the life of the race than any other nation 



242 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

that ever existed; whose sway was co-extenslve with 
the known world; whose heroes and poets, and sages 
and orators, are still familiar names to us; whose liter- 
ature and art still furnish us models; whose language 
has enriched every modern tongue, and though long 
dead, is still the language of science and of religion, 
and whose jurisprudence is the great mine from which 
our modern systems are wrought. That a nation so 
powerful in arms, so advanced in the arts, should perish 
as Rome perished: that a civilization so widely diffused^ 
should be buried as was the Roman civilization, is the 
greatest marvel which history presents. To the Roman 
citizen of the time of Augustus or the Antonines, it 
would have appeared as incredible, as utterly impossi- 
ble that Rome could be overwhelmed by barbarians, as 
to the American citizen of to-day it would appear im- 
possible that the great American Republic could be 
conquered by the Apaches, or the Chinooks, our arts 
forgotten, and our civilization lost. 

How did this once incredible thing happen? What 
were the hidden causes that sapped the strength and 
eat out the heart of this world-conquering power, so 
that it crumbled to pieces before the shock of barbarian 
hoards? A Roman historian himself has told us: 
"Great estates ruined Italy!" In the land policy of 
Rome may be traced the secret of her rise, the cause of 
her fall. 

"To every citizen as much land as he himself may 
use; he is an enemy of the State who desires any 
more," was the spirit of the land policy which enabled 
Rome to assimilate so quickly the peoples that she con- 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 243 

quered; that gave her a body of citizens whose arms 
were a bulwark against every assault, and who carried 
her standards in triumph in every direction. At first, 
a single acre constituted the patrimony of a Roman; 
afterwards the amount was increased to three acres and 
a half These were the heroic days of the Republic, 
when every citizen seemed animated by a public spirit 
and a public virtue which made the Roman name as 
famous as it made the Roman arms invincible; when 
Cincinnatus left his two-acre farm to become Dictator, 
and after the danger was over and the State was safe, 
returned to his plow; when Regulus, at the head of a 
conquering army in Africa, asked to be relieved, be- 
cause his single slave had died, and there was no one 
to cultivate his little farm for his family. 

But, as wealth poured in from foreign conquests, and 
lust for riches grew, the old policy was set aside. The 
Senate granted away the public domain in large tracts, 
just as our Senate is doing now; and the fusion of the 
little farms into large estates by purchase, by force, and 
by fraud, went on, until whole provinces were owned by 
two or three proprietors, and chained slaves had taken 
the place of the sturdy peasantry of Italy. The small 
farmers who had given their strength to Rome, were 
driven to the cities to swell the ranks of the proleta- 
rians, and become clients of the great families, or abroad 
to perish in the wars. There came to be but two 
classes — the enormously rich, and their dependents and 
slaves. Society thus constituted bred its destroying 
monsters; the old virtues vanished, population declined, 
arc sank, the old conquering race actually died out, and 



244 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Rome perished, as a modern historian puts it, from the 
very failure of the crop of men. Centuries ago this 
happened, but the laws of the universe are to-day what 
they were then. — Henry George. 



CENTENNIAL ORATION. 

(JULY 4, 1876.) 

222. The great movements of mankind upon our 
globe, since it became the theatre 0/ human life and 
human events, can never cease to be the subject of 
profoundest interest and loftiest contemplation. There 
is a spirit in man, urging him on with the strong mo- 
mentum of eternal law, to a destiny that ever allures 
him with mystic wonder and fascination. The earthly 
horizon of that destiny, ever retreating, invites him to 
the full and complete dominion of a world not yet sub- 
dued to intellectual and moral being. Generations, 
races and nations, inspired by impulse greater and 
mightier than themselves, move forward in grand con- 
sentaneous procession, and history unfurls her banners, 
the symbols of eternal purpose. 

One of the most sublime conceptions of which the 
mind is capable, is the contemplation of the periods of 
time during which the earth was being prepared to be 
a fit habitation of man. Compared with those periods, 
the lifetime of the human race is but a moment, or a 
thought flashed by electric touch from city to city. The 
introduction of man upon the earth is a modern event, 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 245 

modern as the morning of to-day ! The Egyptian 
civilization is but of yesterday, compared with the 
formation of the delta of the Mississippi ; and the 
alluvial plains of the Euphrates, the first abodes of 
human society, were the work of cycles and seons of 
unrecorded time. These periods of time and prepara- 
tion, in the contemplation of which the mind is op- 
pressed with the vague sense of infinity, suggest, with 
striking intellectual and moral force, the importance of 
man's place in the scale of created things, and the 
rank he holds in the order of being. The last term in 
an ascending series, involved in all that goes before, 
crown and summit of creation, end and fulfilment of 
primal intent and purpose. Science unfolds the order 
of nature and reveals her method and law, but man, 
his fortunes, his deeds, his nature and his destiny, are 
ihe noblest objects of thought and study. He is 
superior to nature, in that he recognizes the law of 
nature and the law of his own being. He discovers 
truth, good and evil, and is haunted by the thought 
that not death, but increasing life is his goal. Progres- 
sive reason achieves new conquests in every age, and 
can never rest until it is established upon the throne of 
the world, and the sublime affirmation is realized, 
" Thou hast put all things under his feet." Man, so- 
ciety, nationality, government, give intellectual and 
moral import to a material universe, and the progress 
of history is the elevation of the moral character of 
mankind. 

The American Continent, earliest in geologic time 
of all the lands of the globe, was reserved to these 



246 CALirORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

later days to be the theatre of a new cycle of human 
cLihure, and a new display of the power of human 
society. 

The ancient oriental civilizations had flourished for 
thousands and tens of thousands of years, and sent 
forth those great migrations that founded the succession 
of Asiatic Empires, reared the fair forms of Grecian 
culture and the strength of Roman arms, made Europe 
the nursery of nations, and England the foster-mother 
of the modern world. Christianity, that religion which 
more than any other seems adapted to universal man, 
had kindled its holy signals on the hills of Judea nearly 
fifteen centuries before the Pilot of Genoa was born. 
Rome expired a thousand years before. During all 
these vast movements of mankind, and through these 
historic ages, when the soil of the world was being pre- 
pared to receive the seed of the Modern age, the 
American Continent lay concealed behind the horizon. 
The Ptolemaic system held the universe in the thral- 
dom of the senses, and religion, not yet allied to reason, 
enforced the thrall. The mind was enveloped in sense, 
and the sight of the eye, and the hearing of the ear, 
interpreted the world. The sun rose and set, and the 
earth was an extended plain. Imagination, strong 
angel of truth, had not looked with undazzled eye upon 
that inaccessible glory which the senses cannot touch. 
The outward manifestations of power filled the mind 
with vague wonder and fear, while reason had not yet 
discovered their law. It was the seed-time of history, 
the germinating period of human thought. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 247 

It is now four hundred years since the European 
world began to feel those premonitory pains that go 
before the births of time. 

How the great ideas, that now govern the world as 
the common thought of men, first dawned upon the 
solitudes of genius, is beyond the power of man to tell. 
It is common to account for it in the intellectual law of 
suggestion or association. Accordingly, we are told 
that the apple falling from the tree in Newton's garden 
sucforested the law of ^gravitation. But this is a mis- 
take. The conception is in the mind; the apple does 
not convey it. It comes as the morning comes; it 
comes as the ripening of the grain; it comes as the 
flush of the vintage, distilled in mystery and silence — 
but behold, a new heavens and a new earth, without 
noise or fear! The round world, as it lay in the serene 
imagination of Columbus, is one of the most striking 
illustrations of the power of an idea that history records. 
His heroism to obey the idea, and, contrary to the opin- 
ions of his age, to follow it across the trackless deep, 
gives him an undisputed rank in the hierarchy of faith, 
and an immovable pedestal in the temple of earthly 
fame. Those masterly achievements of fidelity to a 
a thought that characterized the discovery of the New 
World were fit precursors of the fortunes of that New 
World, destined as it was to be the field of new princi- 
ples, in which the majority of mankind did not believe. 
The birth of navigation may be said to have been sim- 
ultaneous with the discoveries of the fifteenth century. 
Among the conquests that man has made over the ob- 
stacles that the barriers of the world offer to his pro- 



248 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

gress, navigation must take first rank. It spans the 
awful abysses of the sea, makes the communication of 
nations and races possible, supplements human wants 
by the exchancjce of the products of the earth and of 
human skill, and tends by its mighty processes of inter- 
course and communication to establish the equilibrium' 
of the condition of mankind. Navigation was the be- 
ginning of that system of communication upon the 
earth which is the striking feature of our own day, and 
makes man at home in the world. 

A true theory of the solar and planetary worlds had 
vaguely emerged from chaos, in the devout reason of 
Copernicus; and the steady lights of the upper deep 
became the faithful guides of the trustful mariner, as 
he ploughed the dark longitudes from land to land. 
Copernicus did not announce and defend his theory, for 
fear of the Church, but his mind was the seed-plot of 
the idea of modern astronomxy, and was one of the 
powerful causes that contributed to the intellectual con- 
quest of the material world at that period. When 
lying on his death-bed, and near his end, he united the 
expression of his devout faith and inspired intelligence 
in sentiments such as the sacred lyrist has embodied in 
his verse: 

Ye golden lamps of heaven ! farewell ! 

With all your feeble light, 
Farewell, thou ever changing moon — 

Pale empress of the night. 
And thou, refulgent orb of day! 

In brigliter flames arrayed — 
My soul, which springs beyond thy sphere, 

No more demands thine aid. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 249 

The two ideas, one of a round world, as it lay in the 
brooding mind of Columbus; the other of the solar 
system, as it dawned in the intelligence of Copernicus, 
were the sovereigns of that time. 

But there was a nobler moment yet. It may be 
summed up in that general and somewhat vague ex- 
pression, the Reformation. In all the complex causes 
and relations which conspired in that event, the pith 
and quick of it was that it centered in man himself, and 
concerned his rights, his duties, his nature, and his des- 
tiny. The Reformation was to man himself what the 
round world and the solar system were to his concep- 
tion of the material universe. It was the free activity 
ot the individual mind in fealty to eternal, moral law. 
It brought order into the moral world, by making the 
individual a centre of power. It abolished authorities 
imposed from without, and instated the perceptions of 
reason and conscience within. It appealed from the 
few to the many; from the priest to the people; from 
the traditions of the elders to the mind and heart of 
man. It was not the revival of an old life, but the in- 
spiration of a new; the transfer of civilization to a 
new center of development. The old syscem had com- 
pleted its orbit; but that orbit was not the complete 
cycle of human progress, ever widening its range and 
rising higher. Men are the conscious instruments of 
powers, principles and ideas which they do not fully 
comprehend. They are the exponents of a period, but 
they do not originate its principles. It is a mistake to 
suppose that Martin Luther originated the Reformation, 
or that he was the father of it in any sense. The 



250 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Reformation would have come if Luther had not been, 
and the moral, grandeur of his figure in history is de- 
rived from his ability to discover the signs of the times, 
to read the horoscope of the period and confess the era 
of God. If you inquire for those mighty thoughts and 
sublime impulses, which are the seeds of human history, 
you ascend to those heights where genius o'ertops in- 
telligence and insight becomes inspiration. The 
settlement of this continent by a strong and powerful 
race, who planted on these shores the seed of a new 
historic period, was the result of the Reformation. It- 
was a movement that had its origin in the noblest 
moods of the human mind. Let no cheap animosities be- 
tween Catholic and Protestant dim the clear, calm^ 
historic vision; let no jealousies of the provincialisms 
of human feeling intrude themselves into that august 
presence. 

Among the men who contributed by force of moral 
genius to reduce the chaotic elements of that period to 
order and form, thus supplying the practical working ma- 
terials of progress, there is one whose name and whose 
principles have been singularly associated with the life of 
American institutions — I mean the lawyer, theologian, 
statesman of Geneva, John Calvin. It was he who 
gathered up the scattered moral powers of the Reform- 
ation, condensed them in definite, dogmatic, popular 
forms, and administered the affairs of religion in a re- 
publican spirit, thus making his Iiorribile deer etiun fate or 
the seed-plot of Republican liberty. If his doctrine 
was cruel, it was the offspring of a cruel age. It was 
not Protestant or Catholic that was cruel; it was the 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 251 

condition of the human mind. That terrible doctrine, 
which now is hke a nest of a former year from which 
the brood has flown, pervaded Christendom, and sent 
forth a mighty race that fought against tyranny every- 
where, always sided with the people, gave victory to 
the plebeian Roundhead over the lordly Cavalier and 
sent forth a new Israel to take possession of this prom- 
ised land of mankind and liberty. Calvinism was dis- 
persed throughout Europe, and probably influenced 
more minds than any other system of doctrine or polity 
devised by man. Scotland was imbued with it, and 
through her philosophy it tinged the thought of the in- 
tellectual world. The Huguenot stock of South Caro- 
lina inherited it. William Penn was taught by a 
famous Calvinist. The early Dutch colonists of New 
York were of that lineage, and the settlers of Plymouth 
were of that athletic race. 

The system of free schools was devised by Calvin's 
brain and heart, and beyond the boundaries of sect, his 
hand, unconscious of its power, scattered the seeds of 
Republican liberty. As our American Idealist has wove 
it into verse that shall vibrate on all the chords of 
time, he 

" Wrought ill a sad sincerity; 
Himself from God he could not free; 
He builded better than he knew — 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

In the hard and thorny husk of a cruel system were 
hid the seeds of a new life among the nations, and a 
new era for mankind. 



252 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Thus the life of American nistitutions had Its root in 
the old world. The health of the scion attests the 
vigor of the native stock. Whatever may have been 
the exploits of former races on this continent, whatever 
power or glory their civilization displayed, they acted 
no part in the drama of the new era, and contributed 
nothinof to the life of the new asfe. The traces of the 
mound-builders are a melancholy record of a race that 
we may gratefully believe fulfilled its destiny, and had 
no reason longer to be upon the earth. The native 
Indian — humble child of the forest, weak and passionate 
— dashes himself against the walls of the world, or dis- 
solves like ice flowing into tropic seas. American civi- 
lization is of European and English origin. It is a 
new center of human culture, from a seed matured in 
the highest and best experience of mankind. 

It must be confessed, humanly speaking, that the 
union of the American Colonies, first against foreign 
encroachment and then under a constitutional govern- 
ment, was a happy accident. But history distils wis- 
dom and honor and power from human folly. The 
mad councils of George III lost him his colonies, but 
created a new nation. Had a better spirit prevailed, 
England might have been the mother of the Republic, 
or two Englands might have ruled the world. The in- 
dependence of the American Colonies was brought 
about by those mixed causes, which, to the superficial 
observer, seem to be an inexplicable jumble of 
stupid blunder, blind folly and mad self-will. But to the 
philosophic historian, they are that apparent chaos of 
human events and human things over which the spirit 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 253 

of order ever broods, bringing forth the true, the beau- 
tiful and good. Evil is never unmixed, and the truth 
enveloped in error, falling upon the furrows of the 
world, expands, bursts its environments, and buds and 
blooms. 

Doubtless there is much vague declamation and 
would-be philosophic gravity in talking about the "idea" 
of our government, or the "idea" of our institutions. 
There is probably no proper sense in which it can be 
said that government has any idea or theory at all. 
Certainly the science of government, if there is such a 
science, is not an exact science, and its principles are 
continually applied to new facts and new conditions, in 
a new method. The unfolding of a principle is a 
growth, not a mechanic law. Thus, in all enterprise of 
man's affairs, in all administration of human things, the 
grand question is: Is it only a dead fact, or a living 
law? Admitting fully all the limitations that practice 
sets to theory, still theory goes before practice, and in- 
cludes practice. But the only theory, or idea, which a 
free government can have, is the growth and develop- 
ment of the principle on which it rests. This is the 
difference between constitutional liberty and absolute 
monarchy. The one is the arbitrary application of a 
rule; the other is the unfolding of a principle. The 
one is a wooden fact, the other is an inspired truth. 
And thus in respect of ourselves and our historic origin 
as a people and a nation, the question is: What was 
there at the bottom of this display of social order, that 
has so gone on where man nor angel never dreamed? 
The early settlers of the continent had no conception 



254 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of it. They brought with them the mature fruit of 
human experience, the latest that hung upon the 
branches of the tree of Hfe. That fruit was the con- 
viction, nay, more, transcending all reasoning process, 
the insight of inspired moral genius, that man's nature 
prefigures his liberty, and that he is and must be free 
to act of himself under moral law! That conviction, 
that insight, was new. The men themselves did not 
know what it meant nor where it would lead. And 
why should they? A man can not tell even what his 
house will cost beforehand, and why should they under- 
stand the vision of truth that had never been applied 
to the guidance and government of men.-^ The world 
had been governed by force, invading even the recesses 
of thought. Exclusive powers and privileges were 
held and exercised by the few, and the idea of man as 
man had no place on earth. Even the Almighty 
Maker and Ruler had his favorites, and no long-minded 
eternities of beneficent power brooded over the destin- 
ies of mankind. One of the most influential races that 
has ever lived on the face of the earth, inhabiting a lit- 
tle country on the borders of the Levant, that the mod- 
ern traveller can " do" in the saddle in five or seven 
days, made even religion aristocratic, claimed that God 
was their God, and that they were His people to the 
exclusion of everybody else. I am not indifferent to 
the historic development of opinion, nor to the influ- 
ence of Hebrew Theism upon the destiny of the human 
world ; but it furnishes a striking illustration of the ex- 
clusiveness of human thought, associated as it common- 
ly is, with the monopoly of God and contempt for man. 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 255 

But truth mincfled with error tends to work itself clear. 
When we talk about the theory of free government, 
we mean, if we mean anything, that the bottom of it is 
the principle of liberty, as it is elementary and funda- 
mental in human nature. And like other principles', if 
it is a principle, it is to be followed, and not to be led. 
Ifitisbas^id upon the equality of men — that is, the 
equality of human nature — it is the affirmation that 
man everywhere is man — made of the same powers, 
passions and affections ; that he has the same origin 
and the same destiny. The senses are the same in all ; 
intelligence is the same in all ; affection is the same in 
all ; reason is "the same in all ; conscience is the same 
in all ; faith is the same in all. These may be deve- 
loped in different degrees, and expressed in different 
terms, but they have their root in the same soil — of the 
same common nature. As I was riding, the other day 
in the suburbs of the city, among the sand hills, that 
form so striking and bold contrast with the cultivated 
and powerful portions of the town, I met two children, 
who by their habit and manner, showed that they be- 
longed to the worthy, respectable poor. Their frugal, 
tidy dress, their unstockinged feet, their modesty in pre- 
sence of a stranger, flushed the very sand with loveli- 
ness ; and in their little sun-burnt hands they held 
loosely a few flowers, such as Nature gives in her 
bounty to relieve her desert places ; and they were 
comparing the colors, as the sunlight poured down its 
golden rays and filled the urns of beauty. I said to 
myself, Behold the identity of human nature! The 

same love of the beautiful that fascinates the soul of a 
17 



256 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Titian or a Tintoretto ! This is what we mean by the 
equaHty of men, the identity of human nature. This is 
the seed of human progress, and the promise of man's 
destiny. Our Repubhcan Democracy is founded on 
that. It has always encountered suspicion and jealousy 
and evil foreboding from those who are not imbued 
with it ; for if there are those who are too ignorant and 
wretched and benighted to be free, there are those, also, 
who are intelligent, yet who lack the moral genius to 
discern that they belong to the human race. 

The history of the country for the hundred years on 
whose summit we now stand, has been little else than 
the development of this principle. On these mighty 
waters the nation sails, and the horizon forever recedes 
and earth and sky never meet. Our principles, so far 
from being exhausted, are only beginning to be unfold- 
ed, and we may justly expect that they are to play a 
leading part in the fortunes and destiny of mankind. If 
human progress means anything, it means the enjoy- 
ment of the highest privileges and immunities of exist- 
ence by all ; it means a fair field for every man to pur- 
sue that line of thought and action which his own indi- 
viduality directs, and which, to him, is the purpose of 
his being. All truth is expansive, and greater than 
men think when they first adopt it. The smallest seed 
of liberty when it is sown becomes a tree, and strug- 
gling human aspirations take refuge in its branches, or 
refresh themselves under its shadow for new resistance 
against ancient and venerable wrong. He who would 
confine the influence of free institutions to this theater 
of our display, would make a great mistake. The 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 257 

winds are its messengers, the lightnings do its biddings, 
the ocean is its mediator. The heart of man, source 
of restless imaginations and never satisfied longings, 
aspires to it from afar. 

It would be impossible, on an occasion like the pres- 
ent, to recount the events, the deeds, the persons of 
this century of republican liberty. That is the office of 
the historian, the philosopher and the poet. It is 
enough for us to-day to take counsel of our principles 
and reaffirm them as the profound conviction of our 
minds, attested by the experience of a century. It was 
announced a hundred years ago by the founders of the 
government that all men are free and equal. We have 
read it to-day from the famous Declaration, and it will 
be read by those who shall come after us down the 
rolling tide of centuries to the latest recorded syllable 
cf time. It is no contrivance of extemporaneous 
device; it is no rule for the exigency of the moment, 
cheap subterfuge of tyrants. It is in the eternal nature 
of truth, and things, and man and God. Neither is it 
v.ny vagary or "glittering generality" in our minds but 
of clear, decided import and energy. It is as old as 
the heavens, and as new as to-day, and we claim for it 
th;it immortality that belongs to essential truth. 

We affirm and declare to-day, as the fathers did in 
1776, that all men are free! And we mean by it that 
lundamental fact of human nature by virtue of which 
man is man, endowed by heaven with the power to 
choose between good and evil, and to direct his course 
towards those ends that seem to him best! We mean 
t'.iat the office of Government is to protect that freedom, 



258 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and not to encroach upon it ; to throw around it the 
environments of law, that under law it may be liberty 
indeed! 

We affirm and declare to-day, as the fathers did in 
1776, that all men are equal! Hear it, O Heaven! and 
give ear unto it, O Earth! We mean by it the identity 
of that nature whose inspirations of reason and con- 
science are the same in their eternal quality and divine 
essence! We mean that reason is reason, that conscience 
is conscience, that imagination is imagination, and that 
the progress of mankind is grounded in this common 
nature of man. On this we base our hope of humaa 
progress, and our faith in human destiny. Does expe- 
rience give any ground for that hope and faith ? 

Human society on this continent for a hundred years^ 
has been led forth under the power of the principles 
which we affirm and declare to-day. A continent has 
been subdued to culture. A degree of external human 
comfort has been attained and enjoyed, that probably 
has not been surpassed in any portion of the earth, or 
in any period of history. Let us cheerfully accord 
whatever is due to the cheapness and fertility of the 
soil, but let us also be just to human energies. The 
results of scientific research have been applied to the 
arts of life, and whatever pertains to man's conquest 
over the material world has been made as complete 
here as in any other country. The area of the country 
has been extended by peace and by war until its bor- 
ders are laved by both oceans through twenty degrees 
of latitude. The country to-day presents a theatre of 



SOCIETY AND THE STATE. 259 

world-grandeur for the display of free Constitutional 
Government. 

The affairs of the Government have been adminis- 
tered by those whom the people have chosen. Uni- 
versal suffrage makes revolution unnecessary, by giving 
every man the right to appeal to the ballot as the final 
remedy of all public wrong. We have never had under 
this plan a wicked or dissolute President, and if we ever 
had a weak one, the people have been steady enough 
to endure his weakness, conscious of their strength. 
AVe have never had a corrupt or mercenary Judge, and 
the judicial mind and ethic of the country, I speak 
firmly without boasting, compare favorably with the 
judicial mind and ethic of Christendom. The bad 
inheritance of slavery, bequeathed to us from the an- 
cient estate, we esteem no longer a portion of the 
nation's wealth, and have absolved ourselves from its 
obligations by the blood of the sons of men. We have 
received from the nations of the earth and the islands 
of the sea, more than five millions of men, welcoming 
them to fairer opportunities. We have entrusted re- 
ligion to the religious sentiments of human nature, 
without the interference or support of the State, and 
the free contributions of men surpass the tribute of 
reoral splendors. 

We have laid the foundation of a system of educa- 
tion for all in making the public school free, and in 
making it secular. Its benefits are only beginning to 
be felt, but the mind of the country is awake, and we 
may expect the best results of a system that has an 
ideal excellence beyond any present practice. W^e live 



260 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

in obedience to order and law, without violence; and 
good feeling and good manners shed their invisible, 
mighty protection over all. American society has never 
required a standing army to enforce order upon the 
people. We feel that the Government is steady, be- 
cause its base is broad — reaching to the freedom and 
equal rights of every man — and that, in the long run, 
the laws which the people make themselves they will 
respect. 

One hundred years ago the foundations of this city 
(San Francisco) were laid by the ancient monarchy of 
Spain. If the principles which I have rehearsed are 
true; if the attainments that have been made under 
them are a just expression of their wisdom and power, 
we may take pride and gratitude in our citizenship, and 
renew our vow to the freedom and equality of men. 
Let mighty salvos proclaim it ! Let banners wave in 
proud homage and triumphant joy ! Let the sea roar, 
and the fullness thereof! Let us bid the future genera- 
tions hail ! Hail ye happy races yet unborn that shall 
receive such an inheritance! Let the people lift up 
their voice: Yea, let the people lift up their voice: 
Te Deuni Laudainus. — Rev. Horatio Stcbbins, 




FRATERNAL SOCIETIES 



PART VII. 

FRATERNAL SOCIETIES 



FREEMASONRY. 

223. The Temple of Solomon must stand as it 
was built. It could not enlarge itself, kt could not 
bud with smaller temples, and then take chem in under 
a widening roof or a swelling dome. Neither, when 
some of its pillars decayed, could it restore its own de- 
crease, as the living cedars of Lebanon repair their 
wastes and renew their leavc:s. But our conscious 
temple does all this, and noi':dlessly. It fills in its losses; 
it enlarges its sweep and sway; it does it through men 
of all conditions and classes and races; and still it 
stands in its old proportions, though in greater ampli- 
tude — symmetrical, mysterious, sublime. — T/ios. Starr 
Kins'. 



"&> • 



224. EvER\'\VHERE, Order is the great interest. 
What humanity needs is the fulfillment of the indica- 
tions of nature; freedom with order; a proper con- 
sciousness of worth in every breast. A recognition by 
each man of the worth and claims of ever)^ other; and 
an acknowledgement by all of a common and controlling 
law. This idea of order, fulfilled in the architecture of 



262 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

nature, is committed as a trust to our fraternity, and the 
proper reverence for it is poured out continually through 
the influence of our hallowed bonds. — Thomas Starr 
King. 

226. This is the most remarkable social organiza- 
tion in the world. None on the globe, with half so 
many elements in its composition, is so old. We are 
told that excavations made under modern Jerusalem 
disclose remnants of the old city in various periods of 
its history. Portions of the massive masonry of the 
time of Solomon are uncovered. Above these appear 
fragments of the work of Zerubbabel. On a higher 
historic stratum are specimens of workmanship from 
the acre of Herod the Great; and still above these, but 
below the level of the present city, are remains of the 
constructive toil ordered by Justinian. We delight to 
feel that the past, measured by as niany ages, is under 
us; but it is not beneath us in a broken symmetry and 
a dead grandeur, as under Jerusalem. It is rather 
beneath us as the roots are beneath a tree, and as the 
central rings are hidden in the trunk. They give 
power and pith to the structure still. They are part of 
its present majesty, sources of its living vigor, prophe- 
cies of its future strength. — Thomas Starr King. 

226. No EDIFICE which our ancient brethren 
reared was equal to the living structure of which they 
and we are portions. How often we read or hear with 
pride, that in the building of the first temple, the stones 
were made ready before they were brought together; 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 263 

SO that there was neither hammer, nor ax, nor any tool 
of iron heard in the house while it was building. What 
is that to the growth of our Order itself? How quiet 
the process, yet how constant ! Who hears the noise 
of it? Who sees or knows when the sound timber and 
the approved stones are brought together, and fitted and 
lifted to their place, amidst the roar and strife, and 
selfishness of the world? Yet, in thousands of towns 
and cities — in every zone — in almost all communities 
and tongues of men, this work, in substantial sameness 
of method and pledge, is going on. — Thos. Starr King. 

227. Do WE ever get tired of the toils and tax of 
charity ? Suppose the sun did ! What does he receive 
in homage or obedience from the orbs that swing round 
him, in comparison with what he gives — all his light, 
all his heat, all his vitality, for the blessing of four-score 
worlds ? Shall we complain of the demand upon our 
treasuries, or our private purses, for the sacred funds of 
the Masonic Board of Relief? What if the sea grum- 
bled at the assessment which the mighty sun — the Most 
Worshipful Grand Master of the System — levies on its 
substance ! Every day the sun touches its stores with 
its wand of light, and says Give, give. And it obeys. 
Evaporation is its tax, constantly demanded, constantly 
given. Remember, brethren, that every cloud you see, 
whether stretched in a beautiful bar across the east at 
sunrise, or hanging in pomp over the gorgeous pavilion 
of the retiring day, is part of the contribution for the 
general relief of nature, assessed by the lordly sun. 
The water which the ocean keeps is salt. Pour a bucket 



264 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of it on a hill of corn, or a garden bed, and it kills it. 
The water which the ocean gives is fresh, and descends 
in blessing after it rides in beauty or majesty on the 
viewless couriers of the air. Nature tells us that to 
give is to live. — Thomas Star?" King. 

228. No WORK OF man's hand can withstand the 
silent tooth of time. The mighty monuments of the 
forgotten past reveal themselves to us only in dim tra- 
ditions, or in almost undistinguishable fragments, puz- 
zling the lore of the antiquarian and baffling the light 
of science. They leave us like the mariners on the 
wrecking midnight sea, looking — oh, how hopelessly — 
for the coming light. But principles cannot die. Truth 
is eternal. Justice, equality, fraternal love, charity, 
faith, hope, are invulnerable and immortal, all. They 
are emanations of the eternal good — sparks from the 
eternal fire — drops from the overflowing river of im- 
mortal life. So with the inner life of Masonry. Its 
temples may totter to the dust and its visible tokens be 
utterly lost, but IT will survive. Its spirit is the spirit 
of the "All-working Good" — its work is the practical 
embodiment of all-working benevolence — its mission on 
earth is but the reflection and exemplification of that 
divinest of all virtues — Charity! 

We speak of martyrdoms, and they are glorious. 
We speak of heroisms, and they are glorious. How 
they stand out in the past, like land-marks in the life- 
gloom, these martyrs for the good, these heroes for the 
right! Some have sunk on the battle-field; some have 
watered the scaffold with their blood; others have per- 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 265 

ished in the asfonies of fire. These have been of one 
race and lanofuaofe; those of another. This endured 
all things for one faith, that for another; but all, 
whatever their nation, or sect, or lineage, were alike the 
warriors of humanity, and perished that mankind 
might be free. The great and good of all eras form 
one great brotherhood. Thank God, for having thus 
linked distant ages together by the ties of a common 
sympathy. The great souls, scattered along the high- 
way of history, are bound one to another by an electric 
chain ; and thus the influence of heroic deeds thrills 
from century to century down the long avenue of time. 

— Dr. Henry M. Gray. 

229. Venerable Body ! thy origin runs back to 
the misty ages, far beyond the reach of history's pen, 
or tradition's tongue. In thy ranks kings have gladly 
taken their places and sat them down with lowly sub- 
jects. There the man of might has clasped in friend- 
ship the hand of him of humblest position and poorest 
means. Thou hast smoothed away the unevenness of 
life and regarded with equal favor the worthy poor and 
worthy rich. The scholar, the philosopher, the man of 
science and of song, the mechanic, the laborer, the 
merchant, the miner, the farmer, and the learned pro- 
fessions, have all paid glad tribute to thy worth, thy 
usefulness and thy power. The great Washington, the 
sampler of all good, and the embodiment of all worth, 
lived and died thy subject and thy friend. Thou hast 
been in every nation and clime, and with a protecting 
providence hast hovered over thy sons. In peace and 



266 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

in war thou hast kept the noiseless tenor of thy way. 
Thy benevolent spirit has sought the couch of the sick, 
the bier of the dead, and the place of the widow and or- 
phan; it has made a home for the stranger in a foreign 
land, and has sent a friend to the prisoner in his cell. 
Mysterious union of mingled excellencies! thy founda- 
tion is laid in the profoundest wisdom, and thy corner 
stone rests on immortal principles. We thank thee that 
thou hast afforded us so clear a proof that it is in the 
power of man to found a union of brothers that defies 
alike the spirit of change and the vicissitudes of time ! 

— Sainuel M. Wilson. 

230. Wherever we may go, upon whatever land 
our feet may rest, there, among thinking men, we shall 
find a language which speaks of faith, hope and charity. 
Those are the three links in the golden cord which 
binds men together in every part of the civilized world. 
Even now, while I speak, (May 15, 1 861) in the metropo- 
lis of Great Britain a convocation of our brethren 
from all parts of the earth are assembled. Around 
their festive table will be found the representatives of 
all races — men from all climes — the Caucasian, the 
Mongolian, and Ethiopian. When the Grand Master 
of th;it convocation, whether he is a noble, or of the 
humbler walks of life, rises at the head of the table and 
says, "Together, brethren," he speaks a language which 
thrills every breast in the assembly. It is the same 
language which says, "Our country, our whole country, 
and nothing but our country." — Miltoii S. Latham. 

'31. Freemasonry, quietly, unostentatiously, un- 



o< 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 2G7 

obtrusively, marches hand in hand with civilization. 
When the first flag of our country was reared upon the 
Pacific Coast, our own banner floated in a mystic union 
with it, and patriots and masons struck hands together 
in the good work of perpetuating human liberty, and 
alleviating human suffering. I thank God — and I say 
it with all the reverence due from the creature to the 
Creator — that there is one spot upon this green earth 
where we can all meet and all kneel around the same 
altar to offer up our devotions to the same ev^er-living 
God. There no envy, no strife, no discord, is ever 
permitted to enter. The humblest citizen in the land, 
if he be honest, true and faithful, and meet the require- 
ments of our order, stands upon the same level with the 
chief magistrate of the commonwealth — aye, or a king 
with a crown upon his brow. No tests of nationality 
are known among us; but, one band of brothers, our 
mission is that of peace and good-will, and, though the 
sections of our common country should be arrayed 
against each other, bayonets bristle, military commands 
resound, swords gleam in the sunlight, and every patriot 
stand appalled, yet even the awful aspect of these 
things could not turn the heart of one brother mason 
against another. — A^. Greejte Curtis. 

232. I WEAR my badge of masonry with pride 
and exultation. I know, as I pass along the streets, 
that men unknown to me, look kindly upon me because 
I am one of them. I know that I have no need of a 
long acquaintance before my brother trusts in me, con- 
fides his dearest interests and his most intimate secrets 



268 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

to me. I know that the sunlight, as it is reflected from 
my masonic symbol, carries back with it a ray of sym- 
pathy and mutual understanding to the hearts of thous- 
ands; and it is for that I value and love it. But if this 
badge stands merely by itself, a piece of lettered gold; 
if there is no great meaning symbolized by it ; if the 
fundamental law of masonry ceases to exist, whereby 
the doctrine of love to man and confidence in the 
goodness of his character, is inculcated as a precept; 
or if that becomes a dead letter — if it is not carried out 
in our lives and in the habits of our minds — what care 
I for the bauble ? I wear it now, and feel myself 
stronger and better because I am permitted to do so. 
Strip it of its idea, and I can only wear it from mere 
vanity. — John B. Felto7i. 

233. No MAN can ever be a mason at heart, unless 
he worships God, and loves his neighbor. No charla- 
tan; no hypocrite, no drunkard, no spendthrift, no glut- 
ton, no adulterer, no miser, no man who does not aspire 
and labor to obey the moral law, can ever become a 
mason through any process of admission. Perfection in 
this life we cannot attain, but we can reach towards it 
with faithful hearts and steady eyes. Be it our task, 
amidst the teeming vitality of the Pacific Coast, among 
the race to which we belong, under the institutions by 
which we are protected in the spheres of labor to which 
we are respectively called, not merely on holy days but 
every day, by the cheerfulness and persistence of our 
industry, by the modesty of our pretensions, by the 
promptness and punctuality with which we keep our 
engagements, by the general probity of our conduct, 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 26i> 

by our firmness and patience under afflictions, by our 
unaffected sympathy and charity, by our strong control 
over appetite and passion, and by our temperate enjoy- 
ment of pleasure, to spread the Hght and warmth of 
Masonry. — Hairy E. Highto7i. 

234. Our Brotherhood operating in lodges of 
labor, and extending through all lands, builded many 
of the noblest structures of the middle ages. Free- 
masonry was in those days of violence the ally of re- 
ligion, and assisted the Church to represent in forms of 
enduring beauty and grandeur the sublime hopes of the 
soul aspiring to God and immortal life. Freemasonry, 
however, achieved its grandest triumph when, organized 
and directed by the wisdom of Israel's King, it erected 
the first temple on the sacred mount. No discordant 
sound of metal was heard in its walls'; towers and pin- 
nacles arose into the air like an embodied dream of 
loveliness. During seven years the work continued 
beneath the cloudless skies of Palestine. When at 
length the purple glories of departing day were re- 
flected from its dome, he who beheld that vision might 
well exclaim: 

"A star is trembling on the horizon's verge; 
That star shall glow and broaden on the night 
Until it hangs divine and beautiful 
In the proud zenith." 

Our Fraternity has ceased to be an operative Institu- 
tion. The implements of the craft are no longer em- 
ployed in actual labor. They have become symbols 
of speculative truth, and speak to the mind of laws and 

18 



270 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

duties the observance of which will render our lives 
pure and harmonious, and our characters Arm and sym- 
metrical. We may not regret the change. It was a 
modification demanded by the progress of civilization 
and the improved conditions of society. Throughout 
the world Masonry is to-day doing a nobler work than 
when its Ancient Craftsmen builded their stateliest col- 
umns. The Masonic institution itself is more wonder- 
ful than any edifice which it ever constructed from the 
perishable materials of earth. It has an unspoken 
language older than any living language of Christen- 
dom. It has survived wars and revolutions, and is now 
silently ascending to loftier planes of usefulness. It 
looks to the heavens for its model, and in its work 
imitates the Divine plan of nature. The Sun draws in 
vapory tributes the moisture from the ocean ; the invisi- 
ble winds carry it in clouds over the.globe and distribute 
in refreshing showers the liquid treasures of the skies. 
In like manner Masonry draws its strength and re- 
sources from the deep sea of human sympathies, and 
employs them to redress the wrongs and relieve the 
sorrows of humanity. — Frank Tilford. 

23 B. A LOVE OF TRUTH, with the practice of it in 
every relation of life, is the supreme virtue of Masonry. 
At each stage of his advancement the neophyte is 
reminded that " the first creature of Cod, in the works 
of the days, was the light of the senses; the last was 
the light of reason; and his Sabbath work ever since 
then is the illumination of his spirit." He learns that 
the oracles of truth are the inspiration of the Deity, 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 271 

and in their very nature eternal and immutable. He 
sees the glowing fancies of youth dissolve in the clear 
light of experience, the passions expire in the flames 
they excite, and the strength of manhood vanish amid 
the infirmities of age, while truth alone defies the 
power of time and decay. Allied to the noblest of 
virtues, are the discipline of the mind, the subjection of 
the emotions to the dominion of reason, and the attain- 
ment of knowledge. The character of the period in 
which we live unites with the precepts of the Order, 
and invites us to enter the wide, the boundless fields of 
science. 

The nineteenth century has been styled an age of 
transition. It deserves the appellation. Since its com- 
mencement waves of thought have rolled over the 
nations with a volume ever increasing-, and in tides that 
never recede. The resistless movement carries society 
each revolving year further from ancient landmarks and 
systems of philosophy fast sinking into oblivion. In 
the application of scientific principles to natural forces; 
lA discoveries and inventions which have wrought 
1 :iportant changes in all the relations of the civilized 
world, and in the emancipation of the human reason 
from a thraldom which forbade any inquiry except in 
conformity to certain prescribed theories, the nineteenth 
century claims its splendid and enduring triumphs. In 
the lifetime of the present generation, science has 
launched the steamship on the trackless ocean, and 
impelled it forward against warring billows and oppos- 
ing winds; haj painted with the sunbeam, and made 
the subtle currents of electricity — invisible yet unerring 



272 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

— carriers of thouQfht. It has descended into the dark 
chambers of the earth and exhumed treasures of gold 
and silver, surpassing in value all that men had gathered 
during previous centuries of civilization. Leaving the 
peaceful vocations of industry, and devoting its re- 
sources to the work of destroying life, science has 
forged engines of death more potent than the wildest 
dreams of imagination ever before conceived. It has 
swept with sublime confidence down the abyss of time^ 
and, traversing the countless ages of the past, presents 
to the vision no uncertain pictures of the world from, 
creation's dawn to the present hour. It exhibits the 
earth as a vast sepulchre in which are burried the forms 
of life that have perished. As one generation was 
about to expire, the creative energy of nature evolved 
from it another and higher class of existence. Thus,, 
through successive epochs, we behold a series of phe- 
nomena, governed by harmonious laws, and evincing a. 
complete unity of design. Science ascends with its 
torch to the skies, surveys the celestial worlds, defines 
their appointed courses, and discovers the very elements 
of which they are composed. It points to Alcyone in 
the constellation of the Pleiades, and demonstrates that 
it is a grand central sun, encircled by the universe of 
stars, forming our astral system. Around that resplen- 
dent orb, our sun, with his satellites, revolves in an 
orbit so vast that eighteen million two hundred thous- 
and years must elapse before one revolution is com- 
pleted. 

Thus it is evident that no association, however an- 
cient or benevolent, can exert an appreciable influence 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 273 

unle.ss it calls to its aid educated intellect and the re- 
sources of knowledge. It becomes the duty, as it is 
manifestly the interest, of the Masonic Fraternity, to 
revive in its lodges that devotion to the liberal arts 
and sciences which constituted, in the medieval cen- 
turies in Europe, the attraction of Masonry. Chief 
among the instrumentalities needed to accomplish this 
noble object are Masonic libraries. Every lodge should 
have a collection of literary and scientific works; 
lectures should be encouraged, and members incited to 
prosecute with order studies appropriate to their tastes 
and pursuits in life. After contemplating what the 
genius and learning of man have accomplished, the 
mind naturally seeks the immortal source of all intelli- 
gence. A cardinal tenet of Masonry is a belief in the 
existence of a Supreme Ruler of the universe, and, as 
a corollary to that sublime truth, faith in the immortality 
of the soul. It teaches us that the ineffable spirit of 
wisdom and love animates and permeates all time and 
spice. The soul discerns His presence in every form 
of being and every manifestation of nature; in the 
morning and the evening; in the Spring, with its re- 
freshing showers, and the Autumn, with its rich sheaves 
and golden harvests; in the forest, with their infinite 
variety of flower and foliage; in the mountains that 
lift their hoary heads above the clouds; in the rivulets 
that sparkle in the sunlight; and in the seas that mir- 
ror the glory of the skies. Atheism may spread far 
and wide, shutting out from the soul the hope of 
immortality, but while the Masonic Order continues a 
power on earth, faith will find a sanctuary in its temples. 



274 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Masonry is a recognition of the equality of man, and 
of the fraternal obligations which bind all men together. 
It is the highest expression of the sentiment of uni- 
versal brotherhood. Within its portals there is no dis- 
tinction of lineage or caste. The hereditary ruler of an 
empire ; the scholar whose researches extend over all 
the realms of thought; the soldier, bearing on his per- 
son the glittering trophies of a hundred victories; the 
owner of untold riches, and the laboring man, whose 
ill-requited toil earns for himself a meagre livelihood, 
are all alike — brethren all. 

While rank and wealth divide society into classes; 
while political and religious differences create animosi- 
ties, Masonry speaks a universal language which all 
men understand, and occupies a platform broad enough 
and firm enough for all the world. It violates no law. 
It wars with no sect, party or State. It obeys literally 
the divine admonition: "Let not thy left hand know 
what thy right hand doeth," and performs in secret the 
holy offices of charity. Wherever sin and wrong have 
cast their dark shadow, there is Masonry, to reclaim the 
erring and lead the repentant again to paths of peace. 
Wherever are sickness and sorrow, there is Masonry, to 
watch and soothe; wherever is death, there is Masonry, 
to commit, with solemn rites, the lifeless form to the 
silence of the Q^rave. 

There is no eternity to matter. No work of man can 
resist the ruthless hand of violence or the unsparing 
scythe of time. Even the temple which our ancient 
Craftsmen erected on the sacred mountain, that marvel- 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 275 

ous Structure of con:3ummate beauty, has not escaped 
the universal doom. Note the changes wrought on 
our planet since the era of authentic history. 

Science reveals to us the unchangeable decree of the 
Infinite that the time must arrive, in the grand proces- 
sion of the ages, when all life shall cease upon our 
globe. The atmosphere, with its gorgeous hues and 
banners of clouds, will pass away; the rivers and oceans 
will disappear; the myriad voices of nature will no 
longer arise to the heavens in songs of rejoicing, and 
the mighty monuments of the past will remain, tombs 
of generations that have died amid the awful solitudes 
of a dead world; but the principles of Masonry cannot 
die. They must survive. They are rays from the 
eternal light, drops from the river of everlasting life, 
and, like their deathless original, they too possess the 
attribute of immortality. 

Oh, Masonry! with origin vested in mystery, yet 
whose pathway is luminous with the love of humanity; 
whose life is the spirit of ever-working benevolence; 
whose mission is the divinest charity; may thy stand- 
ards advance, thy temples rise, until Truth, Justice, 
Faith, Charity, and Fraternal Love encompass with their 
holy influences all tribes and nations. — Frank Tilfo7'd. 



ODD FELLOWSHIP. 

236. With the weaving force of the material mes- 
sengers of man, latest brought under his dominion, we 
may name again a more certain agent in cementing the 



276 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. ' 

ties of common nationality — the correspondence, the 
contact, and the council of conversation, of brethren in 
the Order of Odd Fellowship throughout the United 
States of America. 

In a beautiful city at the head of a magnificent bay 
there stands a monument to the Father of our Country. 
It is a companion shaft for the granite column that 
marks the spot where the first real battle of the revolu- 
tion was fought — on the hights of Bunker Hill. Every 
intelligent American who is a visitor in the city of 
Baltimore, feels it to be the duty of a grateful citizen — 
as well as a privilege of pride — to ascend the Washing- 
ton column, and take the inspiration of patriotism anew 
from its lofty summit. In that same metropolis there 
is a far more humble monument, reared by the Order 
of Odd Fellowship a few short years ago. And while 
the spirit of reverential memory is glowing" within us, 
we turn from the towering obelisk to the simple pile of 
granite, and feel that we do no injustice to the mightier 
shades when we give an hour of affectionate recollection 
and homage before the tablets which speak of Wildey's 
fame. We read of a great, honest sympathy, and a 
zeal according to knowledge in the imparting and 
adapting of fraternal rules for the alleviation of human 
suffering and the promotion of heathful social enjoy- 
ments. Who is he that has contributed most in all this 
land for the superadding of friendship's glorious bonds 
to the responsive claim of citizenship ? We take noth- 
ing from other and more intellectual and more demon- 
strative captains of the age, when from immediate 
communication with their record we pass with a full 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 277 

consciousness of equal if not more deserving worth to 
the central altar of Thomas VVildey. And when we 
purchase from the bare-footed flower boy, a bouquet of 
ever-greens and roses, and lay it upon the foundation 
blocks of his modest but elegant monument, we think 
we have paid no vain tribute to the memory of a mor- 
tal man, but by the simplest token have recognized a 
service whose beneficence we have felt a thousand 
times; and which shall not be stayed in its rising wave 
until the tears and woes of this world are submerged 
in the healing tide which shall flow from the fountain 
of benevolence and peace. One sprig of the tena- 
cious cypress that is bound in a votive cluster we de- 
tach with trembling hand, and lay between the leaves 
of a pocket manual of our Order. We will take that 
with us across the great continent ; and in another 
great city, in the same latitude, by the side of another 
ocean, we will place the frail fragment upon the sod 
beside another monument, — which stands above the 
grave of Samuel Parker. — Charles A. Sumner. 

237. Odd Fellowship disregards the factitious 
distinctions in society which wealth and station have 
created, and requires personal worth and moral char- 
acter as the only passport to its privileges and protec- 
tion. It goes beyond the mere physical wants of man 
and proposes an expansion of the human sympathies. 
It ignores the tottering, palsied steps of superannuated 
antiquity, and grapples, with all the ardor of youth, the 
pressing duties of life and the realities of modern pro- 
gress. It seeks to enlighten and educate the mind of 



278 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

man and enlarge the sphere of his affection. — George 
R. Moore. 

238. Our order represents, perhaps in a greater 
degree than ahy other institution, the principle of mu- 
tual assistance, by which society can be reclaimed. 
The rich man would not seek it to increase his riches, 
the learned man his learning, or the great man his power; 
it commends itself to that great body of common men 
who bear life's burthens and responsibilities, and who 
sometimes grow weary with the load. It commands 
its disciples to counsel each other in health, to assist 
each other in difficulty, to defend each other in danger, 
to relieve each other in sickness, and when one falls in 
the ranks, to watch over and protect the objects of his 
love, whom he leaves helpless behind him. But these 
ministrations are only a tithe of its virtues. It seeks 
to improve and elevate the character of man, to en- 
lighten his mind, to enlarge the sphere of his affection- 
Associated together, we can have schools, libraries and 
cabinets. In the charmed circle where we meet want 
must never come — the fear of it must be banished. 
Here must be diffused around all the healthful atmos- 
phere of conscious independence. Meeting together 
frequently in our lodges, mind shall shape mind, intel- 
lect strengthen intellect. Surrounded by emblems and 
symbols, and listening to the teachings of the good, we 
can keep alive in our hearts the sense of the beautiful 
and love of the true. Our institution is a model State, 
whose laws are founded upon justice, administered in 
love, and whose only sanction is honor. We will 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 279 

earnestly but peacefully strive to inaugurate the era of 
social democracy, wherein labor will be endowed with 
the privileges it establishes and enriched with the bless- 
ings it creates. — Newton Booth. 

239. I SHOULD deem that I chased shadows were I 
to recur to the forgotten slanders of the past, or dwell 
upon the feeble objections that a few yet present 
against Odd Fellowship. The world of to-day is too 
enli<7htened to embark in or encourag-e a crusade ao-ainst 
a body of men against whom no evil can be proven — 
whose professed principles are pure, and whose acts, so 
far as they are open to scrutiny, are uniformly charac- 
terized by earnest and self-sacrificing benevolence. We 
stand not now upon the defensive. Our enemies have 
retired before our advancing hosts, their weapons of 
assault broken, their champions in the dust, and we 
are no longer molested in the great and glorious work 
of uplifting the city and temple of Odd Fellowship. 
May the work, so nobly begun, and so successfully 
prosecuted, go on, until ics foundations encircle the 
earth, till its lofty spires reach the heavens, catching 
the first ravs of the risinij sun, and flashino- back its 
beams till the last moment of time. May the millions 
of the future be numbered in its brotherhood, catch 
the inspiration of its free spirit, and forever transmit in 
their integrity the cardinal tenets of Friendship, Love 
and Truth. — A. A. Sargent. 

240. Odd Fellowship, in its practical application 
to its own membership, is human fellowship. Ignoring in 



280 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

this fellowship all political and ecclesiastical distinctions, 
all the caste classifications of human society, this Order 
plants itself distinctly upon the brotherhood of man and 
the fatherhood of God. Its organization is designed for 
efficiency — designed to give efficiency to its charitable 
purposes. It is not founded upon any Utopian theory of 
what may be at some remote period in the future, but 
upon the every-day character of man at the present 
time. Its government is neither a democracy, republic 
nor aristocracy, but has enough of each to prevent cen- 
tral despotism or popular insubordination. Its mission 
is one of charity. It aims to cultivate the holy princi- 
ples of friendship, love and truth, yet it tolerates neither 
insubordination nor trifling on the part of its member- 
ship. Its present government did not spring forth per- 
fect by one elastic bound, as Minerva from the head of 
Jupiter, but is the product of long and trying experi- 
ence. Its trials have been numerous, often threatening 
its authority, and sometimes its very existence; but 
these have imparted to it strength, and fitted it for its 
great mission. Before its altars the rich and poor alike, 
the learned and the unlearned, the high and the low, 
stand upon a common platform. All contribute alike 
to swell its common treasury, and in sickness, all, rich 
or poor, draw alike from the same general fountain, not 
as a charity, but as a right, growing out of membership. 
The Lodge is a school-room for moral and intellectual 
training — for keeping the mind clear and active, and 
the spirit polished, that it may the more easily slide in 
fraternal grooves. Is it of no advantage to the growth 
of the human soul to have the wants of the sick and 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 281 

the claims of the dying, the necessities of the widow 
and orphan weekly, daily, hourly, brought before it? 
Odd Fellowship is now deeply rooted in American soil. 
Its beneficial influence cannot be confined within the 
circle of the Order — it permeates the entire social state. 
With its own elevation it lifts up society. — Gen. John 
A. Collins. 

241. When we look around to see what occupies 
and interests the nation, we find political parties, with 
their various schemes of internal improvement, banks 
and tariffs, public schools, colleges, asylums, railroad 
corporations, steamship companies. Masonry, Odd Fel- 
lowship and the church. These constitute the nation's 
life, and upon them are expended its best energies; but 
they are" not all equally lasting. The institution we 
strove the hardest to maintain, the party we deemed 
most essential to the prosperity of our country, has 
vanished. Where is the old Whig party of Webster 
and Clay ? Where is the Democracy of Jefferson and 
Jackson ? Shivered like glass. The Republic itself 
has shaken from foundation to dome. While we look, 
the object is gone. While the warm words of the 
orator ring in our ears, the institution he praised has 
flitted away; but there is always something left. Not 
all of the supposed pillars of the nation at any one time 
fill, and our aim is to learn which of the institutions of 
a given age are things of a night, to float like a dream 
on the surface of society, and which, with their corner- 
stones on the bedrock of national life, are destined to 
live. 



282 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

The true test of the permanence of any institution is 
this: " Does it rest upon the great law that man is the 
child of God and the brother of man?" In proportion 
as it recognizes and enforces this law, in that proportion 
is it one of those great institutions which give life and 
power to a nation — swallowing up all lesser measures 
and reforms, or moulding them into shape, and impart- 
ing to them whatever of vitality they possess; flourish- 
ing when they decay, and living green when they are 
covered thick with the moss of the tomb. When, 
therefore, we commit ourselves to parties, or sects, or 
institutions, let us remember that some are to go out 
like a taper, or, at most, to live for a generation. On 
these let us not waste our time or substance, for their 
very name shall be blotted out ere the sod has settled 
on your grave. Oh ! man. Oh ! woman, take care lest 
the shrine at which you worship be a whited sepulchre, 
full of dead men's bones ! 

Assuming that the test of the real virtue of institu- 
tions is the degree in which they recognize the truth 
that there is one God, and He our Father, and that all 
men are brothers, how shall it be decided whether a 
particular institution does recognize this truth, and 
hence whether Odd Fellowship stands the test ! One 
of the most difficult problems to solve is whether a 
given institution, potent in its sway over the age, be 
in fact built upon that eternal law, written upon the 
heavens and earth, that God rules and that all men are 
brothers. '" '" '" Odd Fellowship has no other origin 
than the big hearts of the mass of men. To cheer 
each other in the toils of life, to aid each other in 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 283 

sickness and distress, and to bury the dead, were the 
objects of its founders. Gradually the sphere of the 
institution became so enlarged as to embrace the widow, 
and the orphan ; and finally it assumed its present 
noble proportions, not only to aid in distress, but to 
enlighten the mind and expand the heart. Its funda- 
mental idea being that man is the brother of man, and 
hence his equal, its constant tendency is to take man's 
thoughts from self and direct them to his fellow men, 
and thus to bring within the scope of his daily medita- 
tions millions of human beings instead of one ''' '" 
Friend, brother! the man who rises from such medita- 
tions rises a nobler man. What a noble principle ! Im- 
plant it in the heart of every man in the State, and you 
have a whole people animated by one great thought — 
the learned sharinsf their knowledofe with the unlearned 
— -the rich spreading out an open purse to the poor — 
each breathing into the other's ear his struggles, his 
hopes, and his fears. A State so constituted would 
be a glory in peace, a terror in war. 

America boasts 'hat she is a watch-tower of liberty 
— that here the p ;rtals of freedom's temple ever swing 
wide open. Odd Fellowship stands around republican 
institutions a wall of fire aofainst their enemies; and if 
ever the stately columns of this republic crumble and 
go down amid the billows, and the darkness of despot- 
ism settles upon the land- — then, if there be any hope 
— if there be a single gleam of light,— ^the sentinels of 
Odd Fellowship will be there upon the outer wall as in 
the olden time, and to the anxious question, " Watch- 



284 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

man, what of the night ? " will cry out, " The morning 
Cometh." — Jolui B. Hainnon. 

242. The admirers of antiquity have toiled to 
discover the land-marks of Odd Fellowship far back 
amid the mysterious realms of the past. Impressed 
with the beauty and simplicity of its morals and phil- 
osophy, they would teach us to believe it has been gar- 
nished and enriched by the noblest intellects of all time. 
Through the dim vista of cycles lost, amid the moulder- 
ing monuments of ancient empires, they trace its fabu- 
lous history, ever struggling to embellish and perfect 
its fair proportions, by shedding around it the light and 
lustre of primeval grandeur and greatness. In the 
Roman legends, and following their victorious legions 
over the plains of Andalusia, or amid the Druidical 
oaks of Britain, on the fields of Palestine, where fol- 
lowers of cross and crescent met in deadly conflict, in 
the brilliant age of Pericles, amid the flickering lamps 
and solemn mummeries of scholastic cells, they point 
us to the doubtful evidence of its existence. 

I choose to reject the fable of its ante-feudal birth, 
and hail the truth that the dust of antiquity has never 
tinged its vestments. No ancient records tell the story 
cf its praise or shame; it holds no key to unlock the 
mysteries of another age. No Pagan monarch in pur- 
ple has known it, no holy prophet in the dim old wilder- 
ness, no chosen high priest of the Infinite has lifted up 
his incensed hand to consecrate its forms. But the 
weary and the fatherless, the distressed and desolate of 
our own land and age, have enshrined it in their hearts 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 285 

and blessed it with prayers and tears, I choose to find 
its origin in the development of that modern English 
civilization which has been ever foremost in all that 
tends to ameliorate the condition of society, and im- 
prove and perfect the character of man. Reason and 
philosophy indeed would never bid you seek its pres- 
ence beyond that period. An institution like this, 
founded on the most ennobling truths of modern reli- 
gion, proclaiming and vindicating the fraternity of man, 
with the last and grandest of the commandments, "Love 
ye one another," as the summary of its faith, would not 
in the nature of things rise and flourish while the social 
distinctions of the Middle Ages prevailed. While 
science, art, literature and learning were confined to 
the monastic cell ; while the pall of barbarism en- 
shrouded the world, and the glory of man was estimated 
by the thousands he had slaughtered rather than by the 
good he had accomplished; the earth presented but a 
barren field for the cultivation of the virtues which 
Odd Fellowship inculcates. It required another and a 
vastly different condition of society. When the social 
distinctions of the Middle Ages had been partially 
broken down — crown and coronet trampled in the 
dust — and prince and peasant taught to weep and pray 
together; when the plebeian dared assert that flowers 
bloomed for him as well as for the prince, and that the 
natural elements of life and impulses of humanity be- 
longed no less to him than to his imperial master; when 
the mariner's compass had revealed a new continent, 
and the telescope new worlds ; when the two great 
enijines of civilization — war and commerce — had made 

19 



286 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

man better acquainted with his fellow man ; and the 
art of printing had stepped in to disseminate truth and 
intelligence; when the church, at last mindful of her 
peaceful mission, was proclaiming the idea of one vast 
brotherhood in the practice of virtue and enjoyment 
of fraternal love; when in brief all antiquated forms 
and systems were dissolving in the light of increased 
knowledge; and charity, benevolence, and kindred vir- 
tues were supplanting the selfish vices of our ancestors 
— Odd Fellowship sprang into existence. It was the 
legitimate fruit of that great social and moral transi- 
tion — the child of progress, the ward of civilization. 

It has strengthened the cause of good government, 
by teaching obedience to law and respect for superiors, 
in the administration of its own internal polity. 

It has built up a system of jurisprudence, the counter- 
part of the law of the land, and by a rigid enforcement 
of its sanctions, taught at once the law, and the process 
and necessity of its observance. 

It has frowned on turbulence and strife, and di- 
minished the chances of insurrection and rebellion, by 
promptly punishing in every instance insubordination 
in its own ranks. 

It has built up the altars of religion everywhere, by 
teaching with a force and beauty rarely attained in 
other schools, the lessons of immortality and depend- 
ence on Almighty God. 

It has added new charms to the volume of inspira- 
tion, by presenting it as the fountain head of its own 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 287 

beautiful teachings, and adopting its precepts as part of 
its own ritual and lectures. 

It has made religion more inviting, by making it 
more practical — by compelling its votaries to do that 
which religion was satisfied to teach them they ought 
to do. 

It has taught man the true fraternal relation, by im- 
pressing upon his mind that God is the Common Fa- 
ther of All. 

It has promoted temperance and truth, by keeping 
their innate charms ever before the mind in the most 
attractive form, and promptly punishing every departure 
from their principles, or violation of their requirements. 

It has established a new bond of unity among men, 
and by its agency settled and adjusted peacefully the 
thousand difficulties, which otherwise violence and strife 
would have made perpetual. 

It has made man more just and upright, by making 
him more confident of the justice and integrity of his 
fellow-man. 

It has gilded Charity with additional charms; and, 
rearing her altars at every fireside, has widened the 
field of her ministrations, and multiplied her servants. 

It has broken down the artificial distinctions of so- 
ciety, which mere wealth had reared, by compelling its 
followers to meet on the same level and recognize merit 
as the only passport to preferment. 

It has infused the masses with a common sympathy 
and aspiration, by bringing them together in interchange 



288 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of thouo-ht and wish, and uniting their efforts for the 
accompHshment of a common purpose. 

It has made man better, by compelHng him to be a 
perpetual witness to its deeds of kindness and good 
will, and laying on his heart the thanks and benedictions 
of those who have experienced his friendly offices. 

It has stifled resentments and stayed the passion of 
revenge, by pointing, with unerring certainty, to a 
speedy remedy for every wrong, a voluntary atonement 
for every injury and insult. 

It has cheered the poor and unfortunate, kept from 
the heart the demon of despair, from the brain madness, 
and stricken down the suicidal hand by providing that 
timely aid which could be supplied from no other 
source, and pointing to a future full of hope and joy. 

It has promoted the cause of education, by founding 
schools and libraries, to which the friendless orphan 
gains as ready admission as the son of luxury and 
wealth. 

It has conserved morality, by banishing the hard 
necessities which drive men into crime — by keeping out 
from thousands of homes the spectre of famine, and 
casting around its altars the allurements which lead the 
young and giddy up from the play-house and saloon to 
the more refined and virtuous enjoyments of the lodge 
room. 

It has fitted young men for the struggles of life, by 
familiarizing them with the forms of business and de- 
bate, and sending them out on missions at once most 
arduous and delicate. 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 289 

It has made them independent, self-reHant and self- 
respectful, and developed them into earlier manhood, 
by charging them with grave responsibilities and the 
consideration and decision of the most serious and 
complex propositions. 

It has made man more thoughtful of the future, more 
attentive to his present duties, more considerate to- 
wards his fellow-men, and more solicitous for his own 
ultimate destiny, by requiring him, as often as the grim 
messenger invades the Lodge, to join the funeral pro- 
cession to the Silent City, and there contemplate the 
solemn lessons of mortality. — Leonidas E. Pratt. 



THE IMPROVED ORDER OF RED MEN. 

243. The Improved Order of Red Men is the off- 
spring of love of country, of fortitude, and of self-sacrifice. 
It is the child of patriotism, and, as may b^ readily con- 
jectured, it is peculiarly and entirely an American order. 
Not American in that narrow sense which questions a 
man's birthplace, or inquires into his theological or anti- 
theological opinions; but American in a broader and 
more comprehensive definition. American as Niagara 
is an American cataract, and the Columbia an Ameri- 
can river. There are tribes of our order whose coun- 
cil fires are kindled near the icy glint of lakes which 
lie far beyond the northern confines of the Republic. 
There may be wigwams shadowed by the forests which 
circle the base of Orizaba. The order invites to its 



290 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

membership all worthy pale faces, whether aliens or 
citizens, wherever born or of whatever faith. It is 
American only in the sense that its spirit is the spirit 
of the mountains, the forests, the prairies, the cataracts, 
the white-lipped lightning, and the thunder's voice. It 
gathers its traditions from the lost races who have 
passed away and who left in some places the imprints 
of a stranee civilization, and in others the mementos 
of a cruel barbarism — races which like those of En- 
gland, seem to have had an age of stone and an age of 
bronze, but, unlike those of Europe, never an age of 
iron; races which have left behind them the casas 
p'andes of New Mexico, the ancient fortifications of 
the Mississippi Valley, the sculptured monoliths of 
Copan, the aqueducts and cities of Arizona, and the 
pyramids of Northern Mexico; races whose carvings 
in stone, and whose ornaments in pottery and metal, 
and shells, and obsidian, and porphyry, are often un- 
earthed all the way from Lake Superior to the Belize; 
races whosec temples are crumbled, whose gods are 
vanished, and whose records exist only in the undeci- 
pherable hieroglyphics of a language lost and gone. 

Our wiewams we dedicate to the use of an order 
whose chief object is brotherhood and charity; an order 
which hopes to accomplish its benign purposes through 
the love that comes from knowledge of each other, and 
the strength that is born of association and cohesion. 

Perhaps there is not, in the whole vast vocabulary of 
human speech, syllables more articulate with honorable 
emotion than that one word — " dedicate." In the 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 291 

beginning, when the morning stars sang together, the 
first grand dedication was made, and I wonder that 
painters of the pre-Raphaelite school did not choose 
this subject of all others for their master efforts. A 
new and swinging world, plucked out of the stilly and 
starless unknown, her brooks filtrated from the mists 
of chaotic wastes, her fields unblown, her first born 
forests yet succulent with nature's milk, her airs warm 
with wooing motion, and her freshly-tinted skies paint- 
ing the crest of creation upon new-made lake and river. 
Suns unshorn of a virgin beam, and moons propelled 
along unplowed paths, and stars yet untaught in sentinel 
duty, over all this songless world shone ever. What 
though but a dew-drop hanging from the finger of the 
Great Author! It was a world set apart for the uses 
of mortal man, and dedicated in the presence of angels 
to the universal brotherhood. 

No dedication ever brought evil to mankind. It is 
an observation of history, that the temple and the 
tabernacle, whether dedicated to the Oracle, to the 
Unknown God, or the One Supreme, or to Love and 
Charity, still retain the master idea of ages old, still 
rear their proportions, a perpetual rebuke to tyranny, 
and always a stronghold of rectitude and justice, catching 
glints (even through the quagmires of the superstitions 
of heathen nations, or the jungles of obscure faiths) of 
that celestial light which must endure forever. 

The walls of our wiofwams shall never echo a senti- 
ment that is not kindly, and their doors shall never 
open for a deed of injury to any human being. When 



292 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

we have been gathered to the hunting grounds of the 
summer land our wigwams will look upon a field of 
labor and supply larger than we know. A million souls 
shall dwell on the peninsula of San Francisco; temples 
of art and industry, and science and religion, and 
benevolence, shall send a thousand spires to the skies. 
The out-reaching arms of an iron-Briareus will bring to 
our doors the trophies of a conquest which commerce 
shall achieve over forty degrees of latitude. And still, 
even as Yosemite, in the presence of awe-struck tour- 
ists, tosses her soft white lace of falling waters to the 
air, as simply and as purely as in the days when she 
was alone with the forests and the meadows, so will 
the maxims and the deeds and the life of this Order 
bear themselves serene amid the din of human indus- 
try and the selfishness of human struggle. — TJiomas 
Fitch. 



ANCIENT ORDER OF UNITED WORKMEN. 

244. It builds no palatial offices for its managers, 
it accumulates no hoard to tempt its treasurer. It 
has ten thousand trustees in California alone. Every 
man holds a dollar of the funds, which he lays at the 
desolated fireside of the stricken. When the humblest 
member of the Order of this State dies, its Governor 
contributes to the fund for his widow. It brings a man 
into good company, and makes the most out of him. It 
teaches the hand of velvet to rest with confidence 
within the hand of iron. The banker and the baker 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 293 

are one for an hour of need. The weary farmer rests 
his head upon his pillow with the assurance that, if he 
fails to greet the morning light, the faith of ten thous- 
and men is pledged to lift that nightmare of a mortgage. 
It commends sobriety, exalts labor, and enjoins virtue. 
It shadows the land like a fleecy cloud, ready, when the 
thunder rolls, to drop showers of blessings in barren 
places. 

It gathers money quietly, with little effort here and 
there, ^s the sun drinks dew from the open hearts of 
a thousand flowers, and returns it when and where most 
needed. It is instinct with the truest, broadest hu- 
manity; it teaches men to help themselves, and "do as 
they would be done by." It has not aroused jealousy 
in other benevolent and fraternal organizations. They 
recognize that it supplies a want, and extend it their 
support. It is a grand experiment. Other Orders are 
true through life; some do relieve to a certain extent 
the widows and children; this assures them of a right, 
almost a competence. It is the severest test yet made 
of the fraternal spirit. It is the flower of the ages, a 
culminating blossom on the aloe that requires thousands 
of years to develop a bloom. — Philip M. Fisher. 



FRATERNAL INSURANCE SOCIETIES. 

24B. The establishment of fraternal insurance 
associations upon a practical and permanent basis is 
among the chief triumphs of the human mind — in the 
line of moral invention. That this grand consumma- 



294 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

tion, or it may be called discovery, should be reserved 
for our day, must excite at once our pride and our 
wonder. At once simple in its operation and grand in 
its results, we are amazed that its blessings were not 
enjoyed by our remote ancestry as they will be by our 
remote prosterity. If, as the great poet of humanity 
tells us, " all the world's a stage, and all the men and 
women merely players," proud, indeed, may we be, and 
proud, indeed, we are, that we are actors in this new 
drama of brotherly love ; surprised, indeed, may we be, 
and surprised indeed we are, that this drama was not 
put on the stage of human action until the Star of 
Empire had gilded the remotest West, and more than 
eighteen centuries after the Star of Bethlehem first 
illumined the Eastern world. It is given us now, in 
the fullness of time — a living fact, a beautiful reality. 

This great work of fraternal insurance is now being 
prosecuted on a broad basis, and is the mission of 
several powerful organizations, chief among which are 
The Ancient Order of United Workmen, The Knights 
of Honor, The American Legion of Honor, The 
Knights of Pythias, and The Order of Chosen Friends. 

The great truth that one can rarely help many, but 
many can often help one, has never been so generally 
exemplified as now, in the lives and conduct of men. 
Closely allied to it, and entitled to a like recognition, is 
that other great truth, which Odd Fellowship has done 
so much to impress upon the minds and hearts of men> 
that all men are brothers, having a common origin and 
a common father. As upon two certain command- 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 295 

ments in Holy Writ "hang all the law and the 
prophets," so upon these two golden truths rest the 
stately edifices of these Orders whose names I cluster 
here. The work and mission of these fraternities are 
worthy to engage the noblest mind, the most eloquent 
tongue, the amplest study, the closest scrutiny, the 
broadest criticism. They present no abstraction, no 
abstruse proposition, no occult science, no perplexing 
theory, no knotty problem. They unfold a new system 
of organized benevolence, a new plan of co-operative 
effort for mutual security against want and distress. 

No zealous member of either of these societies can 
fail to cherish an abiding love for the Ancient Order of 
United Workmen. That fraternity first opened up 
the broad highway that leads to perfect security in life 
insurance. To the beauties and charms of Freemasonry 
and Odd Fellowship it adds a more substantial feature. 
It has found a way whereby men may help their fel- 
lows without making the recipients of their bounty 
objects of charity. Throwing its fraternal arms around 
each brother in life, it watches over him in sickness and 
death, gives him to the grave with tenderness and tears^ 
then goes to his widow and orphan and empties into 
their laps its purse of gold. 

And this it does, not as charity but as a right. It 
simply executes a sacred trust. It merely turns over 
to loved ones left behind, that which has been honorably 
won for them, and which is legally their due. All this 
it does, and in all this it finds a noble rival in each of 
the other orders whose names I have lovingly entwined 
with its own. 



296 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

We who belong to these fraternal bands, are mindful 
of the compensations of Nature which make life such 
a thrillinsf drama. We need no skeleton transfixed 
upon our walls to remind us of our end. It was the 
mighty fact of Death that called us into being. A 
serene consciousness of our mortality binds us to- 
gether, and will abide with us on the mountain's top 
and in the meadow's lap — when the frost is biting and 
when the flowers are blooming — not pursuing us like 
an avenging fury — not lowering over us like a black 
shadow to blight the landscape of our life; but as the 
fiat of a just God, to purge us of our dross, to stimu- 
late our noblest faculties, to strengthen our manhood, 
and to enable us to confront with serenity and hope, 
*'the great mystery of the grave." 

Verily, beloved Orders! As ye multiply in numbers, 
ye shall remain but one in essence. Ye differ from 
each other only as one star differs from another star in 
glory. Rooted in the hearts, and devoted to the wants 
of men, ye will never pause or tire until some more 
powerful organization, with a greater capacity for good, 
and more adapted to the spirit of the remote age that 
gives it birth, shall take the sceptre from your hands. 
Engaged in a common cause, pursue your beneficent 
mission with unfaltering step. While cherishing a spirit 
of generous rivalry, may ye ever feel the impulse of 
a common purpose, and move onward, hand in hand, to 
the fulfillment of your destiny. 

But yesterday ye were an enigma to the multitude. 
Now ye are known and read of all men. The world 



FRATERNAL SOCIETIES. 297 

sees your work. Humanity applauds it. And the 
marvelous story of your birth will be written by more 
than mortal fingers, to be preserved in the Archives of 
Eternity. 

And when the bound volumes of centuries shall have 
been laid away on the broad shelf of time, and coming 
generations shall look back to this era as to the infancy 
of the earth, these Orders will continue to be recog- 
nized as the strongest ties among men, and the widow 
and the orphan will point to them with gratitude and 
exultation. 

To Thee, great Author of the Book of Life, who 
teacheth to men the lessons of humility and interdepend- 
ence — who knoweth wherefore death came into the 
world, and all our woe — who hath endowed with more 
than mortal powers that offshoot of Thy mind, the mind 
of man — whose comprehensive love doth wrap all souls, 
all worlds, all things that space can hold or thought can 
reach — in whose grand plan the tiniest atoms find rec- 
ognition — God of the Storm, at whose command the 
warring elements lay down their arms and fold their 
hands in peace! God of the storm-rocked soul! whose 
power is revealed not more terribly in the external 
world than in that fiercer realm, the human breast — to 
Thee, unfailing source of life and hope, we address our 
perpetual appeal! 

O, Spirit of Brotherly Love! Ever poised on healing 
wings above the smitten heart, sending thy unfaltering 
ministers into every home of desolation: we offer thee 
the incense of our grateful salutation ! Thou art a 



298 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

spirit of love indeed! Thou art a harbinger of mercy! 
Thou art clothed with light as with a garment! Thy 
voice is like the melody of the brook, thy smile like the 
golden dawn of day! Thou art brightest in the pres- 
ence of gloom, thou art bravest in crises of want and 
misery! No human anguish can turn thee aside, no 
conflict of arms can put thee to flight, no plague or 
pestilence can beat thee back! Thy destiny is inter- 
woven with that of the race whose wayward steps thou 
watchest, and whose woes thou dost assuage! There 
have been Dark Ages, because thou hast hid thy face; 
but through the eons of coming time, thou wilt ever 
live among men and go with them from the cradle to 
the grave. — Oscar T. Shuck. 




DISTINGUISHED MEN 



PART VIII. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 



246. To the Infinite Eye, the qualities that are 

housed in character only, have weight. Indeed, even 

with us, they are not reckoned out, when we weigh men. 

We say an eloquent man has weight on the platform, as 

naturally as that the fat man has weight on Fairbanks' 

scales. I greatly admire the philosophy wrapped up in 

the Hoosier's answer to the Yankee, when asked how 

much he weighed: "I weigh i8o pounds as you see 

me, but when I'm mad I weigh a ton," Almost the first 

question we ask concerning the newly-arrived man on 

our planet, is " How much does he weigh ?" And it is 

wonderful how much weight is increased by the proper 

gymnastic training of our spirits. Wellington, at the 

start, weighed ten pounds; before he died he weighed 

Great Britain and the balance of Europe. Jefferson 

was tossed easily in his nurse's arms at first; but later 

he lifted America. Newton hung very lightly on the 

steel-yards, when first known; but afterwards he hung 

all the planets on the steel-yards that he suspended. 

— Thomas Starr Kin^. 
20 



300 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

LOUIS AGASSIZ. 

(died DECEMBER I4TH, I873.) 

247.— 

Open your gates, O grave! 

Make broad your passage way! 

The form, for which we ask a place, 

Is not of common clay. 

The fertile brain, the silver tongue, 

The genial voice which we 

Rejoiced to hear, are still. We bring 

The dust of Agassiz. 

Chant in the pines, ye winds, 

Murmur, ye waters deep; 

The searcher of your heights and depths 

Lies in his last calm sleep. 

The seeker after truth and light, 

The reader of the past, 

The leader in incessant work, 

Has found his rest at last. 

Ye rustling autumn leaves. 

Drop gently o'er his tomb! 

Ye creatures whom, in life, he loved. 

In reverent silence come! 

Pupils that by his earnest life 

And burning words were led, 

Gather around his quiet grave 

In tribute to the dead! 

Earth, in thy bosom sweet. 
And soft brown mantle, fold 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 301 



The ashes of the sage, who taught 
That truth is more than gold. 
Leave to the vvarHke chieftains 
The vaunted laurel crown ! 
Be lilies, white, and violets, 
Upon tJiis grave, laid down. 

— W, H, DalL 



GEN. E. D. BAKER. 

248. One there was whose noble form was in our 
midst, it seems, but yesterday — gifted with power to 
touch the chords of every heart, endowed with magic 
to open the fountains of laughter or of tears — whose 
words could soothe the malignity of foes, and lift the 
mind to regions of serenest thought; to whom eloquence 
was but the out-breathing of his soul — gone now, swept 
down in the fierce tide of battle! That wondrous brain, 
at one moment the home of strange fancies, the next, 
insensate clay! No more shall his glorious words 
kindle the enthusiasm of our hearts, no more his eagle 
eye flash with the hidden fires of the soul. — Newton 
Booth. 

249.— 
Leap up, My country! not alone the sword 
Is swift and strong; 
The eloquent and soul-inspiring word, 
The earnest flow of sone — 



302 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

All these may in a whelming force be poured 
'Gainst citadels of wrong. 

No one unto himself is solely lent; 

Each human soul 

Must with the surging tides of life be blent. 

The stars that roll 

In shinincr orbits through the firmament 

Are parts of one great whole. 

A star! He was a star! whose radiance here 

Thro' the dark night of war, 

Lit up our hearts with tenderest beams of cheer 

None may restore; 

And thus we mourn him stricken from our sphere 

To shine on us no more. 

Lay him all gently on his mother Earth! 

While tears, like rain, 

Bedew his grave from nation and from hearth 

There rests no stain 

Upon his sword, no tarnish on his worth — 

So dust to dust, again. 

— Mrs. James Neale, 

260. It was somethinof more than the fierce thirst 
for glory that carried the Senator to the field of sacri- 
fice. Hero blood is patriot blood. It was in the spirit 
of the patriot hero that the gallant soldier, the grave 
Senator, the white-haired man of counsel, yet full of 
youth as full of years, gave answer as does the war-horse 
to the trumpet's sound. The wisdom of his conduct 
was questioned. IMany thought that he should remain 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 303 

for counsel in the Senate-hall. The propriety of a 
Senator taking upon himself the duties of a soldier, de- 
pends, like many other things, on circumstances; cer- 
tainly such conduct has the sanction of the example of 
great names. Socrates, who was not of the councils of 
Athens simply because he deemed his office of a teacher 
of wisdom a higher and nobler one, did not think it 
unworthy of himself to serve as a common soldier in 
battle. In the days when Greece was free, when Rome 
was free, when Venice was free, who but their great 
statesmen, counsellors and senators, led their armies to 
victorious battle.'* In the best days of all the great and 
free States, civil place and distinction were never held 
inconsistent with military authority and conduct. So 
far from it, all history teaches the fact that those who 
have proved themselves most competent to direct and 
administer the affairs of government in times of peace, 
were not only trusted, but were best trusted with the 
conduct of armies in times of war. — Ge7i. Jas. A. 
McDotigall. 

251. His career from the time he came to Cali- 
fornia, is depicted in characters such as checker the 
earth when the morning sun, coming from the chambers 
of the east, illumines with a glory only its own, every 
mountain top, and every city, and every hamlet spire, 
and every ascending slope, and every aspiring ridge on 
which he turns, leaving behind them the long dark 
shadows of the still lingering night. Gradually, as he 
rose to the zenith, those shadows, one by one, in 
couples, in multitudes, fled away, until there lay none 



304 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Upon the scene save the few dark Hnes that fell on the 
frozen North. These were the icy souls that no heat 
of genius, no light of intellect, no fire of patriotism, 
could dispel. 

To the untutored eye he presented nothing remarka- 
ble; but to the educated vision he presented a rare 
spectacle of beauty. No frame was more admirably 
developed, no limbs were more admirably poised in 
their setting. Every fibre of his face was a line of 
intellect, sagacity and nobility; his entire head was a 
combination of the type Roman and the type Greek 
— Csesar and Socrates in one. There was not a rigid 
place, not a waste spot, not a lacking place about him; 
everywhere throughout, in mind and body, he was one 
of the most supple, elastic, well-developed of men. 
Whatever untutored eye might overlook in him on the 
crowded highways of life, yet when he stood upon feet, 
delivering his eloquent utterances to his countrymen, 
he was the most graceful and polished of men. Not 
Pericles, not Cicero, not Webster, the grandest of them 
all, in all the personnel of the speaker, was a purer, 
more classic person and orator than Baker. When it 
Is considered that his oratory grew and was schooled in 
the wild west, we know of no higher proof of the 
overmastering genius of the man, who, from so rough 
a workshop, could produce what takes rank with the 
master models of all time. 

In the Courts, those cases that most deeply stir the 
passions of the soul were his to press or to defend, by 
common consent. In the lyceum, in the lecture room, 
in the learned assembly, no man aspired to be his peer. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 305 

On the stump, it seems to me — I speak it deliberately, 
as the calm conviction of my judgment — he never had 
a rival here, nor yet anywhere, nor at any time. I have 
heard the most celebrated stump orators. There was 
always an effort, a reaching forth for the oittre, and the 
fantastic trickery of humor, to please the crowd — a 
general letting down to the vulgarities of the multitude. 
No one of them seemed to be able to hold the mixed 
mass without resorts to the craft that wheedles or that 
makes them stand agape with laughter or with wonder. 
In one word, the orator had to descend to the level of 
the lowest of his hearers. Not so with Baker. He 
lifted the multitude — the red-shirted and the gray ; the 
blue-minded, the sour-minded, the envious, the jealous, 
the ignorant, and the wise; the ruffian and the gentle- 
man, the low and high, all — ^the great multitude — he 
lifted them up to himslf, face to face, and there, like a 
sage, with an eloquence classic as unapproachable, he 
inspired them, the meanest of them, until they thought 
that in them lay sublime power. 

We have been in the habit of looking upon Baker 
more in the light of an eloquent orator than in any 
other aspect of his character. All will be surprised 
when I state that this was not his forte. I have his 
own word for it. 

During an exciting political campaign, I had the rare 
privilege of a<5bompanying him, and being in close inti- 
macy with him day and night. He said to me once, 
alone in our room, after the fatigues of the day, "You 
admire my eloquence, for which I am really grateful, 
but you do not know me; this is not my forte." "What 



306 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

can it be, then?" I exclaimed in astonishment. "If you 
can beat yourself as an orator, in another direction, you 
are certainly an extraordinary man." "Well, think 
what you may," he replied, "my real forte is my power 
to command, rule and lead men. I feel that I can lead 
men anywhere." 

How well he proved his claim to this great power — 
a quality that has no superior among human endow- 
ments. 

The axiom of the ancients that the orator should be 
a man of universal learning, was fulfilled in Baker. 
Upon all the leading sciences and arts, he had mastered 
exhaustless stores of information. With what beauty 
could he group his learned possessions! Who but 
Baker could satisfy the excited heart of a great people 
on the laying of the Atlantic Cable, with a speech in 
which every line was equal to the promise of that sensi- 
tive chord itself, as it lay under the ceaseless throb of 
the mighty deep.-* (See Part X — Editor.) 

Not seldom have I stood with him before works of 
art — of the artist and the artisan — when his rare ability 
of appreciative criticism would have instructed the 
masters of the works themselves. His acquaintance 
with all the range of literature was as nearly complete 
as falls to the lot of any man, and no human being ever 
knew the use of books more excellently well than he. 
In public speaking, no man ever reached higher, and 
trod those altitudes with a statelier step, or poised him- 
self above them with a steadier wing, and all the way 
down to the valley of every day life, a strange charm 
hung about him. — Samuel D. Dell. 



DISTISGUISHED MEN. 307 

JOSEPH G. BALDWIN. 

252. My friendship for Mr. Baldwin commenced 
long- before he came to the bench, and it afterward 
warmed into the attachment of a brother. He had a 
great and generous heart; there was no virtue of which 
he did not possess a goodly portion. He was always 
brim full of humor, throwing off his jokes, which 
sparkled without burning, like the flashes of a rocket. 
There was no sting in his wit. You felt as full of merri- 
ment at one of his witticisms, made at your expense, 
as when it was played upon another. Yet he was a 
profound lawyer, and some of his opinions are models 
of style and reasoning. The opinion of the Supreme 
Court of California in Hart vs. Burnett, prepared by 
Mr. Justice Baldwin, is without precedent for the ex- 
haustive learning and research it exhibits upon the 
points discussed. (The report of this case — Hart vs. 
Burnett— covers lOO pages of the 15th volume of Cali- 
fornia Reports, of which 79 pages, octavo, are devoted 
to Justice Baldwin's decision — The Editor.) 

— 7'ii'dge StepJie7i J. Field. 



DAVID C. BRODERICK. 

253. He had a scorn of falsehood and prevarica- 
tion which it exceeds the power of language to express. 
He had a love of truth, a directness of purpose, a sim- 
plicity of manner, impressing conviction on all ingenu- 



308 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

ous minds, and confounding the craft of his opponents. 
He had a bold, outspoken frankness, a tenacity of pur- 
pose, an indomitable will, and an unflinching bravery, 
which commanded admiration and often conquered suc- 
cess, even when they did not win conviction. He was 
quick of perception, ready in resource, faithful in friend- 
ship, true to his pledges, consistent in principle. Withal, 
he was placid in demeanor; his smile was winning, and 
the natural tones of his voice in conversation often as 
gentle as those of a woman. In morals he was pure, 
far beyond the common standard of public men. But 
if he had great merits he had great defects also. He 
was often too open and free of expression, sometimes 
employing unmeasured denunciation, when silent con- 
tempt v/ould have been equally or even more effective. 
He was often too bold, too fond of effecting by sheer 
force of will what might have been as well accomplished 
with more moderation. His openness prevented him 
at times from a cautious withholding of his plans until 
they were sufficiently ripe, and made them liable to sur- 
prise and counter-plot. He was too magnanimous; he 
could not believe that the same generosity which would 
conquer himself would not subdue others. He was too 
often deceived by those who came to him with pro- 
fessions of friendship or repentance; when he forgave 
an offense, he seemed to forget that it had ever been 
committed, although the injury might have involved 
treachery to himself or a betrayal of his confidence. 
He was sometimes imperious, even beyond the privi- 
lege of a party leader ; he often offended, and some- 
times estranged, those who thought that even in the 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 309 

emergency of an unexpected crisis, they ought to be 
consulted. This last, however, was not owing to a 
defect of temper, but to a principle which Broderick 
assumed, that to be a party leader, one must be ac- 
knowledged as qualified to lead, and that in a sudden 
crisis, he becomes a dictator so far as regards the tactics 
of his party. He sometimes made great mistakes, but 
they were errors of policy and tactics ; they never 
involved consistency of purpose or of principle. These 
were his greatest faults, but even these were the faults 
of a great, generous nature. It was doubtless fortu- 
nate for his country, although a source of melancholy 
to him, that Broderick became isolated, with no kin- 
dred to participate in his fortune and his success — that 
he had no wife or children to share in his affections, or 
to distract his purposes. The man lost in domestic 
enjoyment, but the public gained in the efforts of his 
undivided patriotism and singleness of purpose. Sim- 
ple of tastes, with no expensive habits, and disbursing 
more for purposes of religion and charity than was de- 
manded for all the other outlays of his life, whether 
personal, political, literary or aesthetic, he was above 
corruption, because he was superior to avarice, and to 
the lust or necessity of gain; and the only temptations 
to which he was subject as a public man were the stim- 
ulus of a patriotic ambition and the cravings for an 
honest fame. 

I do not wonder that the people of the prehistoric 
ages deified many of their great men who were cut off 
in the prime of their powers. If we read the obscure 
lessons of history aright, I do not doubt that the demi- 



310 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

gods of antiquity were but the historic memories of 
great men whose mission had been interrupted by- 
death — a catastrophe to which the wants and hopes of 
their contemporaries could not be reconciled. Could so 
much power, so much potential goodness die? Would 
they not return again to earth, where so much remained 
for their accomplishment, so much for them to do? 

Hope awaited their new advent until "hope waited 
against hope," and finally deified the attribute whose 
return to earth had ceased to be expected. "They 
will no more contend beside us in our earthly conflicts, 
butyOr us with the fates above." 

When we see the aged Adams expiring in the Capi- 
tol, we are ready to exclaim with him, " This is the last 
of life." When the great soul of Clay sends up its 
last aspiration in the legislative city where his life had 
been spent, we ejaculate a reverential "Amen!" WHien 
the wearied spirit of Calhoun, in its intense intellectual 
activity, wears away the last thin film which binds it to 
corporeal life, we joyfully chant at once the " Requi- 
escat" and the "Resurgam." When the great intellect 
of Webster seeks a death-bed in the retreats of his 
*' Sabine farm," we tune our throats to the No7i omnis 
moriar of Horace, and the more sublime, "I still live!" 
of the Puritan patriot. But when one goes forth like 
Broderick, in the maturity of his manhood, in the full- 
ness of his powers, in the ripeness of his intellect, in 
the perfection of his moral discipline, hoping so much 
himself, and of whom so much was hoped — when such 
a one lies clown forever upon his bloody couch we are 
as unreconciled as the husband over the grave of his 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 311 

first love; as inconsolable as the mother over the corpse 
of her first born. With swelling hearts and tearful 
eyes, we vainly protest against the irreversible decree, 
and are almost tempted to exclaim: " It cannot, must 
not, shall not be!" But alas, while we struggle in the 
closing coils of a great grief, the departing spirit passes 
onward, solemn, silent, and majestic, towards the spirit 
land, ever expanding its colossal proportions as it 
recedes, until it is swallowed up by the still more 
gigantic darkness. And while we still gaze, with long- 
ing, eager, straining eyes, as if the rending veil of night 
would again reveal his returning form, comes to us 
upon the moaning wind from the great Walhalla of the 
dead: " He will not turn back again, he will return to 
earth no more." 

God speed thee, then, true son of the masses, most 
appreciated when forever lost! Brave type of man- 
hood! Bright example of self-reliance and self-culture! 
Noble illustration of free institutions! Firm patriot 
and true man, friend dearly loved and truly mourned, 
farewell, farewell! — John W. Dwindle. 

254. The politician and the ambitious man of the 
world, as he appeared to most people, was the worst 
side of his character. His intellect was of the quickest 
and most comprehensive order, and his will was so 
powerful as to enable him to concentrate his whole 
mind on any given subject. Hence, in the midst ot 
the most exciting political contest, he could at will 
withdraw his mind from it, and give the closest attention 
to whatever he was readinsf. His active intellect com- 



312 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY, 

pelled him to read, for he had Httle relish for vulgar 
amusements, and his tastes always inclined him to be 
very much alone. He was almost an ascetic in his 
life and habits. His passions and appetites were com- 
pletely subject to his will. Accordingly, he read im- 
mensely. Of classic English literature he had read 
everything; and what he read, he analyzed, weighed, 
and considered. His nights were spent over the works 
of the grand old masters. No one who did not know 
him intimately would have supposed on meeting him 
in the street, that he had spent half of the night previ- 
ous in reading the most abstruse poetry. Yet very 
likely such was the fact. The works of all the great 
poets were as familiar to him as houshold words. His 
tastes led him to admire the weird-like, subtle, and 
mysterious. Of all English poets, he especially ad- 
mired the mystic, spiritual Shelley. Tennyson, too, 
was a great favorite of his; so was Wordsworth. But 
how few of those who supposed they knew him well, 
had any idea of his rich stores of classic knowledge. 
He had such an aversion to anything looking like 
pedantry or affectation, that only very few, and those 
his most intimate and trusted friends, were aware how 
extensive was his reading, and how general his knowl- 
edge of books and men. He also felt his want of early 
education, and distrusted himself very much when books 
and literature were under discussion. Yet as he grew 
older and came more in contact with men, he more 
fully appreciated his own powers. During a long per- 
sonal intimacy, I can recollect no act of his unworthy 
of a man. I have walked the streets for hours with him 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 313 

when the world was wrapped in slumber, and conversed 
on every conceivable subject, but never knew him to 
give expression to a low or ignoble thought. I was his 
friend, and, knowing him so well, shall cherish with 
pride his memory to the last. — Frank Soiile. 



ROBERT BURNS. 

265. Burns caught his inspiration in the walks of 
daily life, amongst his own class, and from the nature 
in which he lived and had his being. The wings on 
which he soared, were love and humor. His flights 
were througbthe free air, and were guided by a hne 
moral sense. He was not sublime ; but beyond any 
poet, he comes home to the heart, he leads us into the 
quiet sunlight. The sweet smell of nature salutes us, 
and the fresh dew hansrs tremblino- on his leaves and 

o o 

flowers. By the rippling streams, on banks and braes 
and heathery knolls, in the green dell and along the 
moorland edge, he takes us. Sometimes his spirit 
apostrophises the storm, as it sways the lofty pine, and 
sweeps through the forest with a mighty sigh ; but 
generally, it bathes in its tender light something that 
we can love. '"'' '" "' Thy voice is heard as a sweet 
tenor! — scarce heard, indeed, when the swell of 
mighty notes prevails, when Milton's superb bass rolls 
out, as from unseen spheres; when again, the martial 
recitative of Scott, or Byron's sonorous baritone peals 
forth; but ever and anon stealing in the ear with a 
quiet melody, clear, simple, and true, which searches 



314 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and plays amongst the tendrils of our nature, stirring" 
the fountains of tenderness within us, until the unbidden 
tears come forth, and our touched hearts acknowledge 
a Master's power! A nation's tongues take up thy 
strains! They go, wandering in pathos and power, 
through the valleys and amongst the hills of thy native 
land, waking her echoes and sinking into the hearts of 
her people, softening them and making them brave — 
prolonged beyond her narrow bounds, and carried 
wherever her sons wander, till they encircle the earth, 
and from every clime ascends a spontaneous thank- 
offering to the Great Source of all poetry, in gratitude 
that He woke thy glowing minstrelsy. — George Gordon. 



AARON BURR. 

256. With many qualities which go to make up 
greatness, Burr was not a great man in the highest 
sense of that exalted character. He was not great 
because the moral element was absent, for which no 
daring deeds or brilliant faculties can compensate. Not 
vulgarly selfish in small things, he was selfish as to 
everything which he proposed to himself as an object 
worthy of achievement or acquisition. Self was the 
center to which and from which everything else flowed 
and radiated. His country, his party, his friends, were 
only prized or regarded as so many instruments of 
self-acTQ-randizement, to be cherished or laid aside as 
they were, or were not, useful to his purpose. His 
sense of honor was little more than an intense personal 



DISTINGUISHED MExN. 315 

pride, and he was bound loosely, or scarcely at all, by 
the ties of justice or of social or moral obligation. He 
had no enlarged love of country or of race. He was not 
so much an unprincipled man as a bad-principled man. 
He acted from system, but it was a false system. His 
character, so robust and manly in some of its attri- 
butes, was deformed by a love of intrigue, which de- 
ceived himself at the same time that it betrayed an 
utter destitution of sincerity and truth. He was one 
of the few brave men who preferred to prevail by cun- 
ning rather than by strength or boldness. His intellect 
was more remarkable for cultivation, finish and perfec- 
tion, for the number and activity of its alert faculties, 
than for its scope, or comprehension. He was, indeed, 
fitted for the hio^hest excellence in some executive 
posts; but these were not the highest positions, and 
did not require the highest genius — and even in these 
offices it was not safe to trust him. In the depth and 
amplitude of his understanding, and in profound and 
varied learning, he was not the equal of Hamilton. 
He never could have written the numbers of the 
Federalist, or have debated with Jefferson on the 
Funding Bill or the Bank of the United States. He 
left no favorable opinion of his genius, or sense of his 
character, upon the country. Burr must be assigned no 
higher position than that of a brilliant and unscrupu- 
lous adventurer, with the good and bad qualities which 
have distinguished such characters in all times — in the 
Crusades, as hireling soldiers of fortune, called Knights 
of the Temple, as the Companions of the Norman Con- 
queror, as among the DeBracys, the Brian de Bois 
21 



316 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Gilberts, the Dalgettys of fiction, and the Murats, the 
Junots, and the Massenas of modern history. He was 
not guilty of treason — he was only a filibuster — the 
pioneer of filibusters. As a man of intellect, he was 
not comparable with Hamilton, Marshall, jay, Jefferson 
or Madison. We know less of him as a statesman than 
of any man of his time. He neither established any 
principles of government, nor prominently advocated 
any; he proposed no measure of importance; he left no 
new views of civil polity, nor had he any distinctive 
scheme of administration. He was a politician rather 
than a statesman; a lawyer rather than a jurist; more 
anxious for personal success than the triumph of a 
party; solicitous of the elevation of particular men to 
ofifice, especially of himself, more than the ascendancy 
of any determinate principles. As a partisan politician, 
and as a partisan soldier, he was eminent. All of his 
faculties were employed to advance the immediate pur- 
pose before him; but he was too restless and too intent 
upon the present, to be wise or provident for the future. 
He was a hand-to-mouth politician; he left the future 
to take care of itself; and his whole failure in life is to 
be attributed to this eagerness, impatience and improvi- 
dence '" "'' At an advanced aged he was stricken 
down by paralysis, a helpless bed-ridden old man over 
whom the darkest shadows of penury and desertion 
gloomed in the bleak winter of an unprosperous life, 
another Lear in his afflictions, but bearing up against 
them with a buoyancy of spirit which was denied to 
the smitten king whose calamitous fortunes he repre- 
sented. He was at the close of his career the same 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 317 

man in all the characteristics which distinguished him, 
that he was in his summer prime. He turned upon 
the misfortunes of his latter days, and upon the death 
that was to consummate or to end them, the same gaze 
of unquailing courage and of cheerful composure, which 
he had turned in earlier years upon his mortal enemies. 
He died at the age of eighty, in the full possession of 
his faculties, without a groan or a murmur. We are 
reminded of the memorable picture Scott has drawn of 
the combat between Both well and Balfour of Burley; 
when the bold royalist had fallen, his sword-arm broken, 
and his dagger lost; and the fierce covenanter, having 
passed his blade through his body, and putting his foot 
upon his neck, exclaimed: " Die as thou hast lived — 
hoping nothing — believing nothing," "and," said Both- 
well, collecting his whole strength for his last respira- 
tion, ''Fearing Nothing ." — Jud^e Joseph G. Baldwin. 



CLAY, WEBSTER AND CALHOUN. 

257. Clay, as in death he went between his com- 
peers, so in his life he was a medium between their vast 
diversity; but Webster and Calhoun were perfect op- 
posites in mind and thought and Labit. The one based 
all his reasoning upon fundamental principles of right 
and v^rrong, and these were of divine original. The 
other drew his criterion of argument and duty from the 
obligations of the human law. While one asked, " Is 
it right?" it was the sole inquiry of the other "Is it 



318 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

legal?" The discourse of Webster Is pervaded and 
illuminated by a living faith; the speech of Calhoun Is 
cold, and stern, and rayless. Taking for its first prin- 
ciples the fundamental compact among men, it argues 
up to this with unerring accuracy and iron logic. Yet,, 
by a seeming paradox, though Webster, In his private 
life, did frequent violence to the faith he professed, Cal- 
houn, on the contrary, practiced the habit of severest 
virtue. He, of Massachusetts, gave a liberal Indul- 
gence to his appetites and passions, while the Caro- 
linian lived In asceticism the most rigid, a recluse from 
all indulgence. Here ends the parallel: In powers of 
mind the most exalted, in patriotism the most inflexi- 
ble, and in devotion to the service of their country 
which endured unto the last, these master spirits stand 
in strong resemblance, and to each the dying hour was 
bright with the radiance of immortal hope. — Joseph W, 
Winans. 



DICKENS IN CAMP. 

258.— 

Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting^ 

The river sang below; 
The dim Sierras far beyond uplifting 

Their minarets of snow. 

The roaring camp-fire, with rude humor, painted 

The ruddy tints of health 
On haggard face and form that dooped and fainted 

In the fierce race for wealth. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 319 

Till one arose, and from his pack's scant treasure, 

A hoarded volume drew, 
And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure. 

To hear the tale anew; 

And then, while round them shadows gathered faster. 

And as the firelight fell, 
He read aloud the book wherein the master 

Had writ of "Litde Nell." 

Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy — for the reader 

Was youngest of them all — 
But as he read, from clustering pine and cedar, 

A silence seemed to fall; 

The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows, 

Listened in every spray. 
While the whole camp with "Nell" on English mead- 
ows 

Wandered, and lost their way. 

And so in mountain solitudes — o'ertaken 

As by some spell divine — 
Their cares drop from them like the needles shaken 

From out the gusty pine. 

Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire! 

And he who wrought that spell ? 
Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire. 

Ye have one tale to tell! 

Lost is that camp! but let its fragrant story 

Blend with the breath that thrills 
With hop-vine's incense all the pensive glory 

That fills the Kentish hills. 



320 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

And on that grave where English oak and holly 

And laurel leaves entwine, 
Deem it not all a too-presumptuous folly — 

This spray of Western pine! 

— F. Bret Harte, 



HENRY DURANT. 

(FOUNDEE of tub UNIVEKSITT of CALIFORNIA, AND WUO SELECTED THE SITE OF BERKELEY. — EDITOR.)- 

2B9. So simple and unpretending was this man, 
so unobtrusive and so modest, that it will astonish many 
when I predict for him a longer and greater future than 
for any man who has yet come to our shores. It seems 
to me that when men who living, have attracted much 
more attention than he, are forgotten, as if they had 
never lived his memory will grow fresher and greener 
with every succeding year; that, like the wine of 
California, which is said to lose its earthy taste when 
transported from its native soil, he will lose whatever 
gave to him mortal appearance in the long lapse of 
years. 

To his cultured mind everything that man had 
thought, everything that man is thinking now, was full 
of interest. There was In him none of that spirit which 
would throw a Galileo into prison, or clip the wings 
of a Newton to prevent his flight among the stars. 
He delighted to sit with Plato at the feet of Socrates. 
He dello^hted to let his imaorlnatlon roam with the old 
poets, and with them see a god in every hill and a 
nymph in every tree. He was glad that the learned 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 321 

men who are now living are giving their lives to bold, 
unfettered thought, and he believed that the result 
of their deep and reverential meditation would eventu- 
ally be to show that revelation and profoundest philoso- 
phy were but different roads to the same great truths. 
He knew, for his studies had taught him, that the argu- 
ment, apparently the most unanswerable, might hide a 
fallacy which would take ages of profound thought to 
disclose; and when any system of philosophy denied, 
or even led up to a doubt of the great religious truths 
which he learned in childhood, he waited patiently to 
discover the error. 

In the freedom of thouofht which he allowed himself 
and which he considered right, I have no doubt that 
there were times when his mind was agitated — when 
doubts, spite of himself, would creep in— when the ar- 
gument so ingeniously put would leave him for the 
moment without an answer. But still he remained 
steadfast to his early faith. Like one of those stately 
ships in our harbor, tossing and straining, yet riding 
securely on the waves; so he, though the winds shook 
him, and the seas dashed over him, still rode securely, 
and the anchor of his faith and hope never dragged! 

Standing on the heights of Berkeley, he heard the 
distant generations hail, and saw them arise, "demand- 
ing life, impatient for the skies," from what were then 
fresh, unbounded wildernesses — from the shore of the 
great tranquil sea. He welcomed them to the treasures 
of science and the delii^hts of learnincr, to the immeas- 
urable good of rational existence, the immortal hopes 
of Christianity, the lights of everlasting truth ! 



322 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

And so, hero and sage, the memory of whose friend- 
ship raises me in my own esteem, I love to think of 
thee! I love to think of thee thus standing on the 
hights of Berkeley, with strong emotion lighting thy 
features, and the cry, "Eureka!" on thy lips, as thy gaze 
goes through the Golden Gate to the broad Pacific 
Ocean beyond. And I love to think of thee when, in 
other and sadder times, I have seen thee stand on the 
hights of thine own self-raised character, pointing 
through the Golden Gate of Death to the Pacific Ocean 
of Eternity dimly seen beyond it. — John B. Fcltoii. 

260. He WAS pre-eminently a scholar. And this 
means, first, that he was a lover of all learning. He 
welcomed truth wherever found. His attitude toward 
it was not passive, but active. He went after it; he 
sought it eagerly, on beaten highways and shaded by- 
ways, in every nook and hiding-place. He sought it on 
the side of man and on the side of nature, not for- 
getting the relations of both to the God above both. 
He was never afraid of the truth. 

And so he became an adept in learning — in language 
— that is, in the expression of man's thought , and 
God's also, in revelation. He had stores of philosophical 
learning. He had powers of curious combination, 
rare felicity of expression; this, both in interpretation 
and in origination. There were terms of expression 
that threw unexpected light on a point in question. 
He used words with meanings hitherto unreco«"nized ; 
but so apt that the world seemed dull in not having 
discovered them. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 323 

He was an adept in thought, which is what language 
is good for. Any man that is fond of Plato may be 
called a lover of thought. Durant made Plato a special, 
life-long study. 

He was an adept in science. He had an open eye, 
quick to read the outer as well as the inner world. He 
was an adept in oratory; he sometimes spoke in such 
fashion as to enchant and thrill. He was almost an 
adept in authorship. Alas! for the "almost." I know 
of generous, far-reaching plans in that direction, which 
he never fulfilled. He was too busy with other work. 
Multitudinous cares and the very wealth of his aspira- 
tions combined to thwart his plans — and we are so 
much the poorer. We know how much Horace Bush- 
nell, the classmate and intimate acquaintance of Durant, 
has accomplished as an author; and I doubt if his 
mind was more suggestive, more fertile in ideas, than 
Durant's. He had more concentration of purpose, 
more fortunate surroundings. But who shall say that 
even he has done a nobler life-work ? Durant had 
power, not only as a scholar and a benefactor, but as an 
example. He was so lofty in his aims; so unworldly, 
while yet notunpracticed; so modest, so pure, so noble, 
altogether so grand a pattern of a man. When the 
students saw one, so advanced in life, so scholarly in 
habit, go into the rugged Winter of Esmeralda, and 
share the hardships of the poorest miner, not to make 
money for himself, but to make money for his darling 
College, they could not but catch something of his spirit 
of self-denial, of devotion to a noble cause. 

To some his memory will remain as an inspiration 



324 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

to all things whatsoever that are true and lovely and of 
good report. And when this generation has passed 
quite away; when colleagues and co-workers, pupils 
and admirers, have all followed him to the grave, his 
work will remain. It will remain in the institutions of 
high culture, for which he toiled to prepare a foundation; 
in the loftiness of purpose which shall ennoble some of 
the best leaders of the "good time coming;" in the 
blended beauty and strength of character to which he 
contributed in the forming period of California's higher 
and better life. — Pj'of. Martin Kellogg. 



STEPHEN J. FIELD. 

261. Like most men who have risen to distinction in 
the United States, Judge Field commenced his career 
without the advantages of wealth, and he prosecuted it 
without the factitious aids of family influence or patro- 
nage. He had the advantage, however — which served 
him better than wealth or family influence — of an ac- 
complished education, and careful study and mental 
discipline. He brought to the practice of his profes- 
sion a mind stored with professional learning, and 
embellished with rare scholarly attainments. He 
was distinguished at the bar for his fidelity to his 
clients, for untiring industry, great care and accu- 
racy in the preparation of his cases, uncommon legal 
acumen, and extraordinary solidity of judgment. 
As an adviser, no man had more the confidence of his 
clients, for he trusted nothing to chance or accident 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 325 

when certainty could be attained, and felt his way 
cautiously to his conclusions, which, once reached^ 
rested upon sure foundations, and to which he clung- 
with remarkable pertinacity. Judges soon learned to 
repose confidence in his opinions, and he always gave 
them the strongest proofs of the weight justly due to 
his conclusions. 

When he came to the bench, from various un- 
avoidable causes the calendar was crowded with cases 
involving immense interests, the most important ques- 
tions, and various and peculiar litigation. California 
was then, as now, in the development of her multiform 
physical resources. The judges were as much pioneers 
of law as the people of settlement. To be sure some- 
thing had been done, but much had yet to be accom- 
plished ; and something, too, had to be undone of that 
which had been done in the feverish and anomalous 
period that had preceded. It is safe to say that, even 
in the experience of new countries hastily settled by 
heteroo^eneous crowds of strangrers from all countries, 
no such example of legal or judicial difficulties was 
ever before presented as has been illustrated in the 
history of California. There was no general or com- 
mon source of jurisprudence. Law was to be ad- 
ministered almost without a standard. There was 
the civil law, as adulterated or modified by Mexican 
provincialism, usages, and habitudes, for a great part of 
the litigation; and there was the common law for an- 
other part, but what that was was to be decided from 
the conflicting decisions of any number of courts in 
America and England, and the various and diverse 



326 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

considerations of policy arising from local and other 
facts. And then, contracts made elsewhere, and some 
of them in semi-civilized countries, had to be inter- 
preted here. Besides all which may be added that 
large and important interests peculiar to the State 
existed — mines, ditches, etc. — for which the courts were 
compelled to frame the law, and make a system out of 
what was little better than chaos. 

When, in addition, it is considered that an unprece- 
dented number of contracts, and an amount of business 
without parallel, had been made and done in hot haste, 
with the utmost carelessness; that legislation was ac- 
complished in the same way, and presented the crudest 
and most incongruous materials for construction; that 
the whole scheme and organization of the government, 
and the relation of the departments to each other, had 
to be adjusted by judicial construction — it may well be 
conceived what task even the ablest jurist would take 
upon himself when he assumed this office. It is no 
small compliment to say that Judge Field entered upon 
the duties of this great trust with his usual zeal and 
energy, and that he left the office not only with 
greatly increased* reputation, but that he raised the 
character of the jurisprudence of the State. He has 
more than any other man given tone, consistency, and 
system to our judicature, and laid broad and deep the 
fountain of our civil and criminal law. The land titles 
of the State — the most important and permanent of the 
interests of a great commonwealth — have received from 
his hand their permanent protection, and this alone 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 327 

should entitle him to the lasting gratitude of the bar 
and the people. 

His opinions, whether for their learning, logic, or 
diction, will compare favorably, in the judgment of 
some of our best lawyers, with those of any judge 
upon the Supreme Bench of the Union. It is true 
what he has accomplished has been done with labor; 
but this is so much more to his praise, for such work was 
not to be hastily done, and it was proper that the time 
spent in perfecting the work should bear some little 
proportion to the time it should last. We know it has 
been said of Judge Field that he is too much of a 
'case lawyer,' and not sufficiently broad and compre- 
hensive in his views. This criticism is not just. It is 
true he is reverent of authority, and likes to be sus- 
tained by precedent; but an examination of his opinions 
will show that, so far from being a timid copyist, or the 
passive slave of authority, his rulings rest upon clearly 
defined principles and strong common sense. — Jttdge 
Joseph G. Baldwin. 



HENRY H. HAIGHT. 

262. In this age, when scepticism, if not fashion- 
able, is certainly not wholly unfashionable, and when 
often the sceptic thinks warranted in becoming a scoffer, 
there is something refreshing in the spectacle of a man 
of acknowledged integrity, high cultiv,ation and intelli- 
gence, who publiidy avows that in respect of the rela- 
tions of man to his God he has attained to the condi- 



328 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

tion of an absolute belief, and that he is ready and wil- 
ling- to carry this belief out— not only in theory, but in 
action — to its remotest results. Governor Haight had 
attained to this condition. He early adopted the faith 
of a Calvinistic Presbyterian, never wavered from it, 
and was at the time of his death an ordained elder of 
that church. He accepted that belief with all its 
duties; he was faithful to it, not only in his family, but 
also in all the forms into which it ramified itself; in the 
church, the bible class, the Sunday-school, and in every 
collateral organization and enterprise. He was not 
obtrusively demonstrative in his profession of faith, and 
yet his conduct left no one in doubt what it was. If 
challenged, the answer was sharp and ringing. It is 
pleasing to hear his religious associates speak with deep 
affection of the reliance they placed on him for judi- 
cious counsel, for support in crises of difficulty, for ready 
material relief in times of great exigency. His was a 
faith so anchor-bound to the idea of duty, that in other 
times he might have em.ulated some of the early Chris- 
tian martyrs, and have accepted, with equal readiness, 
the mitre of an archbishop, or death at the stake as a 
missionary to the Iroquois. 

He did not possess merely a few good and exalted 
qualities, nor was his character miarred by great defects, 
but it was well rounded. He possessed many good 
qualities in a great degree of excellence, and if any de- 
fects existed in his character, they were so few and so 
small that they were not apparent to the general ob- 
server. And when we have said that his character was 
excellent, we have said all that is claimed for that of 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 329 

Washington himself. He was good; he was sympa- 
thetic; he was kind; he was learned; he was perspica- 
cious; he was honest; he was trustworthy ; he was re- 
ligious; he was faithful. From the many public tri- 
butes which have been offered to his memory, there 
comes up the audible and distinct utterance of one word 
which embodies the greatest encomium which could be 
passed upon his character; and if a monument were 
erected to him, and upon its base were inscribed that 
one word, it would suggest the greatest eulogy we could 
pronounce upon him as a man, a professor of religion, 
a lawyer, and the Governor of our State — Fidelity. 

— John W. Dwinelle. 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

263. In the choir of American poecs, distinguished 
in many respects above the rest — in limpidity of tone 
and variety of expression beyond rivalry — stands Oliver 
Wendell Holmes. In him the freshness and variety of 
nature unite with the brilliance and finish of consum- 
mate art. From youth to age, breathing an atmos- 
phere of literary taste and achievement, he has shown 
how little real incompatibility there is between the 
pursuits of the scientist and the artist. For more than 
thirty years, professor of anatomy and physiology, in 
the leading American college — a position demanding 
in the occupant the keen scrutiny, the profound 
thoueht, and ricfid deductions of the scientist — he 
has yet found and improved opportunities for frequent 



330 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

excursions into the realms of imagination and philoso- 
phy. As poet, novelist, essayist, critic, causeui^ he is 
familiarly known to many who are oblivious of his 
life-long studies, labors, and achievements in the fields 
of science. In poetry or prose, — whether touching the 
lightest themes of the hour, or discussing the awful 
problems of man's origin and destiny, — drawing a 
satiric sketch of New England life and character, or 
limnlns: in never-fadinof colors the traits of universal 
humanity — he is ever master of his subject. There is 
no crudity of idea or of phrase. Beauty of conception 
shines through his clear-cut, diamond-pointed sentences, 
every one of which is a refutation of the famous saying 
attributed to Talleyrand respecting the use of language. 
Of him, as of his great Irish name-sake, the author of 
" The Vicar of Wakefield," and " The Deserted Vil- 
lage," "She Stoops to Conquer," and "The Citizen of 
the World," it may be said, Nihil tetigit quod 7i07t 
ornavit. An attempt to deepen the impression or 
heighten the admiration felt by the student of American 
literature for him — the highest type of New England 
"Brahminism" — would too much resemble the pro- 
verbial folly of painting the lily or gilding refined gold. 
To characterize, with discriminating judgment and 
accuracy of phrase, a genius so unique and so versatile, 
were a task requiring an acuteness of insight and appre- 
hension, a cultivation of taste, and a pen possessing a 
grace, kindred to his own. A literary critic like Sainte- 
Beuve, and a literary artist like Theophile Gautier, 
uniting their talents and special gifts, alone could give 
just estimate and fitting expression of Holmes' char- 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 381 

actcr and genius. Sentiment, the deepest and the 
most dehcate; wit, the most brilhant; insio-ht into the 
human mind and heart, the most subtile; modes of 
expression the happiest and most graceful, find brightest 
illustrations in the pages of this nineteenth century 
literary magician. Admirable as he is in the com- 
moner walks of life and letters, it is as a poet that he 
will live forever in the history of literature. When 
obscurity and profundity shall cease to be regarded as 
synonymous, when quality rather than quantity of work 
shall determine an author's rank, the brightness and 
brevity of Holmes' verse will be in some measure 
appreciated ; and then fully by those choice spirits 
only, who, in exalted moods, look through 

" Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, on faery lands forlorn." 

— Henry H. Reid. 



EDWARD JENNER. 

264. Medicine has canonized him — benevolence 
claims him as essentially her own. Run back through 
all the pages of history, back further yet, until the 
bright light of history, growing indistinct, is gradually 
merged in the sombre twilight of fable; ransack the 
records of philanthropy, dive deeply in the musty tomes 
or more modern volumes that commemorate the lives 
and deeds of those who loved their fellow men, and 
made that love in all respects practical, and you will 
see high above them all, shining in solitary splendor, 

22 



332 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

burning, blazing in immortal light, the mighty name of 
Jcnner; and the century in which he was born, teeming 
with great events as it undoubtedly was, can show none 
that can compare with his discovery. There were dread- 
ful wars and frightful revolutions, the demolition of 
monarchies and the establishment of empires; colonial 
rebellion, struggles for freedom and the acquisition of 
liberty, all of which involved the destruction of human 
life; and just when the century was closing, came his 
discovery, a bloodless, glorious triumph, a deathless 
victory, redeeming, in some measure, the past — its sole 
object the salvation of the human family. The most 
terrible scourge that has ever afflicted mankind, which 
in one century, in Europe alone, destroyed 45,000,000 
of lives, a distemper in itself and surroundings horri- 
ble, drying up the wells of sympathy, overwhelming 
the maternal instinct — so hard to weaken, almost im- 
possible to destroy — driving the mother from her 
stricken child; this is the pestilence that the genius of 
Jenner has robbed of all its terrors; and medicine to- 
day, in the exhibition of all her marvellous possessions, 
cannot show any prophylactic measures against the in- 
vasion of a serious malady to be at all compared with 
vaccination. So much can be said of Jenner's dis- 
covery ; it has given science complete, absolute mastery 
over one most disastrous plague— others remain, bid- 
ding defiance to the science and the art of medicine, 
darkeninof the world wherever and whenever their 
frightful presence is made manifest. Vaccination is in- 
deed the Sacrament of medicine, omnipotent to save, 
and the dreadful rumors of variolous visitations here 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 333 

and there over the world weaken not our reverence and 
love for Jenner, or our faith in his discovery; they only 
serve to demonstrate the criminal blindness, the culpa- 
ble stupidity and inexplicable negligence of mankind. 
Jenner idolized his discovery. In his persecutions and 
imminent martrydom the reflection of what untold bene- 
fit it was ultimately to be to the human family, upheld 
and consoled him; he predicted, as the final result of 
his discovery, the entire annihilation of small-pox, and 
did man respond with a zeal commensurate with the 
importance of the measure to the necessity of faithfully 
following the precepts of its great author, we might all 
see the prediction realized and this most loathsome dis- 
ease swept from the face of God's fair earth forever. 

— Dr. y. Ca77ipbell SJiorb. 



THOMAS STARR KING. 

("relieving guard MARCH 4TH, 1 864.") 

265.— 

Came the Relief. "What, Sentry, ho! 
Mow passed the night through thy long waking?" 
"Cold, cheerless, dark, — as may be fit 
The hour before the dawn is breakinsf." 

"No sight, no sound.-*" "No; nothing save 
The plover from the marshes calling; 
And in you Western sky, about 
An hour ao^o, a Star was falling." 



334 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

"A Star? There's nothing strange in that." 
"No, nothing; but, above the thicket, 
Somehow it seemed to me that God 
Somewhere had just reHeved a picket!" 

— Frank Bret Harte, 
266.— 
Chaste as the fleecy pillow of a star, 
And purely pale as angel watchers are, 
Shines the clear porcelain of your magic bowl 
Till red bright wine is poured into its soul. 
Then lo! a luxury of vines and flowers, 
Of wildwood wreaths and foliage-tangled bowers, 
A blest profusion of enchanted things. 
Gladden its side in fairy pencilings. 
So, when the wine of genius and of life — 
Its taste with sweets, its breath with fragrance rife — 
Filled up the measure of thy years on earth, 
And Manhood's crown had followed Childhood's mirth. 
All we that gazed upon that life complete. 
Found glorious Beauty there the soul to greet — 
Found Truth and Sweetness, Nobleness and Grace; 
Found Love of Country and the Human Race. 
The bowl is broken, and the wine is poured; 
Stricken the wing that to the sun blaze soared; 
And Genius mourns her gentlest, brightest son, 
And Eloquence her grand and peerless one. 
Whilst she, Columbia, only calms her woe. 
To rouse our drooping hearts with patriot glow: 
"O ye, my children, faster by my side 
Stand ye henceforth, since he is gone, my pride ! " 

— Charles Russell Clarke, 



distinguished men. 335 

On a Pen of Thomas Starr King. 
267.— 
This is the reed the dead musician dropped, 
With tuneful magic in its sheath still hidden; 
The prompt allegro of its music stopped, 
Its melodies unbidden. 

But who shall finish the unfinished strain. 
Or wake the instrument to awe and wonder, 
And bid the slender barrel breathe again, — 
An organ-pipe of thunder ? 

His pen! What humbler memories cling about 
Its golden curves! What shapes and laughing graces 
Slipped from its point, when his full heart went out 
In smiles and courtly phrases! 

The truth, half-jesting, half in earnest flung; 
The word of cheer, with recognition in it; 
The note of alms, whose golden speech outrung 
The golden gift within it. 

But all in vain the enchanter's wand we wave: 
No stroke of ours recalls his magic vision; 
The incantation that its power gave 
Sleeps with the dead magician. 

— y. Bret Harte. 



LAFAYETTE. 

268. Animated by the same feeling that prompts 
the maiden to lay aside, in her vows to religion and 
charity, the shining locks her fond mother tended, her 
vain girlhood prized, and the voice of affection praised, 
Lafayette, a boy of nineteen, sacrificed upon the stern 



336 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

altar of freedom the brilliant gifts with which propitious 
fortune adorned his birth. To love one's own country 
is but obeying the instinct of the heart — it is sweet to 
die for our fatherland. The blood quickens, the eye 
illumines, and the arms grow strong, when the ruthless 
hand of enmity would pluck one honor from the flag of 
one's country, or rob her children of one right of their 
Inheritance. But how much more exalted is that spirit 
that weeps over the wrongs of the great heart of hu- 
manity without regard to place or clime ? Lafayette 
worshipped the Genius of Freedom, and defended her 
votaries wherever the sun of a beneficent Creator 
shone. Born to titles of nobility, to claims on kings 
and great men, to wealth, to honor, to opportunities of 
distinction, to domestic happiness and precocious talent, 
he laid these things of earth in the dust, and scorned 
them as little worth, when compared with an enthusi- 
astic love and sacred veneration for the rights of hu- 
manity and the equalities of life. Who among us, with 
all the gifts of fortune and power, the smiles of beauty^ 
the happiness of home, would sacrifice them while life 
was vigorous, and the stream of youth bedewed the 
freshly springing flowers along its course, to struggle 
for the supremacy of a cause affecting a people with 
whom his own had nothing in common but hereditary 
wrongs. To do so is to attain the highest point of 
human greatness. It is to join the vanguard in the 
march of human things. From the humble avocations 
of life, the workshop, the forge, the laborer's bench, 
oftentimes spring such souls as these, covered with the 
heat and dust of want, galled by actual necessity, and 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 337 

smarting under the hand of wrong", and who force 
through the restraints of lowhness, spurn the iron heel 
of dependence, and from the envious crowd rise up 
erect, calm, self-possessed, and great in lofty determina- 
tion of purpose. Another order, and more praiseworthy 
because they have more to lose by failure, are those 
endowed by auspicious fortune with all the attributes 
and blessings of power and greatness; who, without a 
stimulus for their energies other than the noble seed 
sown in their blood by their ancestors, become fore- 
runners in the advancement and elevation of their 
species. To this latter class belonged Lafayette, ful- 
filling by his illustrious life, Socrates' description of a 
great man : "In childhood modest, in youth temperate, 
in manhood just, in old age prudent." — Milton S. 
Latham. 



MAXIMILIAN. 

269. I do not envy him, whatever his political 
feelings, who has read without tears the last scene of 
the tragedy which closed with the death of Maximilian. 
Gallantly, with heroic mien, the young Prince steps for- 
ward to his fate. The executioners stand trembling 
before the undaunted victim. He is in the presence 
of that cfreat Democrat, Death, who laucfhs at human 
distinctions. His place is in the center. His two 
friends are one on each hand. With a gesture he stays 
the executioners. He is still monarch, and his hand 
has the right to confer honor, though on the brink of 
the tomb. 'T belong to a race," he said, "from which 



338 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

come only the leaders of a people, or their martyrs. A 
sovereign has the right to recompense services, and 
you, Miramon, my friend, who have stood by me 
through life so faithfully, take in death from my hand 
the last honor I can bestow. Take the place assigned 
to your monarch to die in, and let me die in the place 
allotted to you." And Miramon, with a pride exultant 
even in that dread moment, bowed gratefully to the 
monarch, whom death was powerless to dethrone. 
Whence came this sublime self-respect, asserted in de- 
fiance of death itself? The pride of Maria Theresa, 
caught from a hundred Hungarian nobles as they 
shouted "We will die for our king," was running 
through his veins; the old traditions of a family that felt 
itself humiliated when Napoleon became one of its 
members, had cradled him. Well he knew that at that 
moment, when the executioners were pointing their 
guns with horrible aim at his heart, far away, in the 
land of his birth, thousands of guns were presented in 
honor of his brother, as the iron crown of St. Stephen 
was descending on his annointed head. He belonged 
to an order accustomed to read in the faces of men, as 
they passed, the awe and respect which it inspired, and 
he revered himself because he belonged to '\t.-—yoJin 
B. Felto7t. 



THOMAS MOORE. 

270. The brilliancy of the warrior, the gleam of 

beauty, and the triumphs of the statesman are forgotten; 

their names perish and their monuments fall to decay; 

but the memory and works of the great National Poet 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 339 

last forever. The influence of poetry upon the dim 
and shadowy outHnes of the past is unequalled. When 
imagination first plumed its half-fledged wing, and 
passion kindled its flame within the heart of man, the 
undying power of this offspring of sentiment and feel- 
ine beean, and will continue amonor men until the 
eternal sunset shall fling its reddening light upon the 
fragments of the dissolvino" world. 

In the mists of antiquity Ireland alone among na- 
tions, was known as the " Island of song." Literature, 
music and poetry were state institutions. The people 
carefully fostered these aids to civilization. The thread 
of poetry was woven into all the occupations of the 
race. Their bards constituted one of the most honored 
classes of the land. They were its lawyers, its musi- 
cians, its historians, and its genealogists. Their harp 
is to-day the national emblem. In peace they sung of 
love and deeds of valor ; in war, accompanying their 
kings, they incited armies to heroic achievements. 
When their country was enslaved, they clung to her, 
and animated her children to remain true to faith and 
fatherland. When the nobles fled, the bards remained, 
sealed their devotion to their native land with their 
blood, and, with dying lips, crystalized the object of 
their existence in the words, " Erin forever." 

It was the mission of Thomas Moore, to revive the 
poetry and music of Ireland. He found, preserved in 
the unwritten songs of his countrymen, the character 
of the people, their legends, their traditions, their 
superstitions, their love for the past, their sorrows in 
the present, and their lofty aspirations for a great and 



340 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

glorious future. Love, loyalty, religion, constancy and 
unswerving devotion for the fatherland were contained 
in these almost forgotten Celtic airs, which roused the 
spirit and chivalry of Erin's greatest bard to those 
displays of word-painting and harmonious numbers 
that have made his name synonymous with that of the 
Lyric muse. 

What is poetry ? Poetry is the mirror of nature, 
and the blossoming of the soul. The elements that 
enter into its composition are invention, memory of the 
past, brilliant imagination, sensitiveness, judgment and 
the power of expression, evidenced by rich language 
and musical feeling. The mind of a poet must be a 
lyre that continually vibrates to the joys of innocence, 
the pangs of misery, and the love and hate of men. 
It should be at one moment like the bright sky; at 
another like the fleecy cloud, when, under the influence 
of the sun, it sheds its brilliantly tinted tears. His 
duty it is to call on men to behold the infinite and 
indefinable character of Omniscience. In a word, the 
intellect of a true poet should be composed of all that 
is great, noble, learned and heroic; and his thoughts, 
moreover, should be resplendent with the emeralds and 
sapphires of a gorgeous fancy glowing upon the white 
bosom of truth and justice. The real and unreal, 
under his magic prism, in assuming varied forms, 
should display all the hues of the rainbow. 

If these tests are applied to the poetical works of 
Moore, they will be found possessed of all the neces- 
sary qualifications in an eminent degree. His name 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 341 

should therefore shine forever as one of the trinity of 
poetical luminaries with Byron and Scott. 

Contented for a short period with the lyric laurel, he 
offered his Lalla Rookh on the altar of Fame. Then 
criticism placed its author with the immortals. With- 
out possessing that great degree of sublimity, passion 
and nervousness which characterizes Byron, and wanting 
to its full extent the exciting, descriptive, spear-clashing 
narrative of Scott, he excelled them both in play of 
fancy, warmth of feeling, honied flow of verse and 
splendor of imagery. What reader of English poetry 
has not been charmed with the rise and fall of the 
words in Lalla Rookh ! Does not the rhythm of the 
verse remind him of the dip of the oar in the blue and 
placid waters of some quiet bay ? Byron's strength 
resembles the crash of the Atlantic wave as it strikes 
the shore ; Moore's the sustained tide of the noble 
Shannon, as it booms along its banks. 

In no other poem of the language are such dazzling 
similies and images found united with such Tasso-like 
tenderness. The critical eye may range in vain through 
English literature for such exquisite ideas as float along 
the melodious stream of this glorious production. The 
author dipped his brush in the most brilliant tints of 
imagination, without sacrificing his love for truth. The 
fame of this work is circumscribed only by the globe. 
It is read in all lanofuasfes. The Persian lover claims 
it as his own, when, in the soft twilight hour, under the 
curtained balcony, he recites its burning lines to his 
enchanted mistress. The Pole, fascinated by its glow- 



342 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

ing thoughts, believes that they are appHcable to his 
historic but ill-fated land. Oh! Bard of the Green 
Isle, these are thy triumphs ! — Francis J. Sullivan. 

271.— 

All hail to thee, where'er thy home be now, 
All hail to thee, thou soaring soul of song! 
Before thy shrine let me a moment bow, 
Thy most devoted followers among. 
To fame's eternal galaxy belong 
The glorious offspring of thy teeming brain, 
Which on the mind in happy tumult throng. 
Lo! Nature opened not her broad domain 
In panoramic splendor to thine eye, in vain. 

Like gems that quicken with perennial blaze, 
Thy fancies flash along each burning line — 
Truth, virtue, valor, love, devotion, praise, 
Mantling upon each page, resplendent shine, 
While music breathes through all her soul divine. 
Music, inspiring and inspired power! 
The heart's intensest ectasies are thine. 
Heaven claims thee as its best and brightest dowen 
And where thy smile doth gleam, no angry cloud can 
lower. 

Poetic impulse never yet was given 

In swifter volume or in sweeter flow 

Than unto thee, whose muse at founts of heaven 

Caught drops to charm the cup of mortal woe. 

Grief, at the solace which thy notes bestow, 

Trembles with hope, and lifts her tear- washed eyes; 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 343 

While faith, inflamed, with visage all aglow. 
And pinions burnished with celestial dyes, 
Beholds, in rapt delight, thy fragrant incense rise! 

O, for a spark of that immortal fire 

Which fed thy soul and nerved thy plastic hand, 

That I might feebly wake the lofty lyre 

Which glowed with symphony at thy command! 

But motionless, in silent awe I stand, 

In hushed communion with its breathing strings. 

They seem to woo me to a fairy land. 

And whisper soft, Earth hath no mortal stings 

For the aspiring soul that soars on lyric wings! 

— Oscar T. Shuck, 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 

272. Who that has ever lived had a more indi- 
vidual peculiar power than the great Napoleon.'' What 
colossal figure in history stands out in more bold relief? 
Yet it was as a member of a class that he respected 
himself, and achieved his power. It was to that class 
that he looked for his reward. Members of that class 
from all ages fired his ambition. On the Alps, Hanni- 
bal was by his side, spurring him on; the rivalry of 
Caesar and Charlemagne invited him to unite the glory 
of a law-giver and orator with that of the great captain; 
and when mankind had paid him the greatest compli- 
ment he ever received — that of shutting him up in the 
stifling cave of St. Helena, as the only means of re- 
pressing his terrible energy — when his great soul was 



344 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

about to escape — "I am going," he said, to "re-join 
Kleber, Desaix, Lannes, Massena, Bessieres, Duroc, 
Ney; they will come to meet me; they will feel again 
the intoxication of human glory; we will talk of what 
we have done; we will commune about our professions 
with Frederic, Turenne, Conde, Caesar, Hannibal." 
Then, interrupting himself, he added with a singular 
smile, "unless, indeed above, as here on earth, they are 
afraid of seeing so many soldiers together." Was this 
last remark simply in irony at the fears of those who 
had thus surrounded a sino^le man with chains and 
soldiers, on the solitude of a rock in mid-ocean? Or 
was that audacious mind dwelling, as death approached, 
on the possibility of some new eternal theater tor his 
boundless ambition — some Titanic enterprise which 
would again enable him to hurl the combined thunder 
of his terrible order? — John B. Felton. 



PLATO. 

273. Plato, on the Immortality of the Soul, will 
be read, consulted, and revered by millions yet unborn, 
when legions of Christian authors on the same theme 
will have passed away forever from the recollection of 
man. No matter what his ideas v/ere in reference to 
the nature of the Deity, or the lesser deities of his 
theology, who clustered around the throne of the Su- 
preme Good; no matter what his conceptions were in 
relation to the creation of the material world, the origin 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 345 

of ideas, and the pre-existent state of the soul, its im- 
mortahty discovered in him a champion whose strcni^th, 
Hke the momentum of a faUing planet, and whose 
eloquence, sweet as the honey of Hymeltus, struck 
widely and deeply in the heart of Paganism, giving to 
faith a longevity not disturbed by death, giving to hope 
amplest assurance of celestial satisfaction, recreating 
that sublime philosophy amid the trials and vicissitudes 
of life, that splendid indifference to death, not born of 
brutish insensibility, which characterized the conduct of 
Cato the Younger when at Utica he believed that with 
the fall of Pompey the liberties of Rome were crushed 
forever. The gates of Plato's heaven opening before 
his enraptured vision, with a majesty of reliance which 
no terror could shake or doubt disturb, he passed 
calmly into that undiscovered country from whose 
bourne no traveler returns. Such was the influence of 
Plato's almost Christian philosophy upon a noble heart — 
Pagan in all respects save in its faith in the soul's im- 
mortality. His influence was not ignored by grateful 
Athens, who saw her children inspired by it, grow 
virtuous in conduct, wise in life, and brave in death; 
and who erected to the memory of her first philoso- 
pher mighty even in death, a temple, statues and altars; 
and cut in gems defying time, which even to this day 
are found near the scene of his great labors and splendid 
triumphs, the features of his divine face, the cynosure 
of the Athenian eye two thousand years ago. His 
philosophy was not for his day and generation alone, 
not for to-day or to-morrow, but for humanity to the 
end of time and the beginning of eternity. Would to 



346 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

God that in this cycle of irrehgion, infidelity and crime, 
some such master spirit could arise, even from the ashes 
of Paganism, to meet and vanguish the legions of 
impious and blasphemous teachers who cumber the 
earth, destructive to man and offensive to God. — Dr. 
y. Campbell Shorb. 



PRESCOTT AND MACAULAY. 

274. When one passes from a chapter of Macaulay 
to Prescott, he perceives an unpleasant thinness, a 
watery paleness. The opulence of language, the afflu- 
ence, the Rubens hues of Macaulay make him feel that 
Prescott used a very limited dictionary. But when a 
volume of each has been read, he sees how vastly 
superior to Macaulay is the thin-worded Prescott in 
opening a vista through the tangled wilderness of the 
politics of strange lands. In the arrangement of back- 
grounds, in the ability to secure large space, unity and 
repose, Prescott was as much superior to Macaulay as 
he seems to be inferior when you look only at the 
foreground. — Thomas Starr King. 



EDWARD NORTON. 

27B. Edward Norton was the exemplar of a Judge 
of a subordinate Court. He was learned, patient, in- 
dustrious, and conscientious; but he was not adapted 
for an appellate tribunal. He had no confidence in his 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 347 

own unaided judgment. He wanted some one upon 
whom to lean. Oftentimes he would show me the 
decision of a tribunal of no reputation, with apparent 
delight, if it corresponded with his own views, or with 
a shrug of painful doubt if it conflicted with them. 
He would look at me in amazement if I told him that 
the decision was not worth a fig ; and would appear 
utterly bewildered at my waywardness when, as was 
sometimes the case, I refused to look at it after hearing 
by what Court it was pronounced. — Judge Stephen J. 
Field. 



WILLIAM C. RALSTON. 

276. A moneyed king has fallen from his throne 
of gold prostrate in the dust. A more dreadful fall 
has ushered him into the portals of the everlasting 
world. The loss is a general one, a great indescribable 
calamity to the State. Had I the power I would hang 
California in the blackest crape, from Siskiyou to San 
Diego, for he has left us who made California a syno- 
nym for princely hospitality and generosity to the utter- 
most bounds of the morning. Whatever may have 
been his defects, his many virtues, his tragic death, 
have hidden them from mortal sight and criticism 
forever. His most fitting, touching and eloquent eulo- 
gium was pronounced in the question asked in every 
street of San Francisco, "Who shall take his place?" 
His heart was as large as the mountain; he was noble, 
generous and true; his friendship unswerving. Honor, 

23 



"348 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

unfading honor, to his memory ! Peace, everlasting 
peace, to his soul. — Dr. J. Campbell Shorb. 

277. What parts of human speech can eulogize 
him? What brush of artist, what pen of dramatist, 
what voice of speaker can depict the benefaction of his 
generous life and the tragedy of his death? His deeds 
may be heard in tones that sound like the blare of 
trumpets. His monuments rise from every rod of 
ground in San Francisco. His eulogy is written on ten 
thousand hearts. Commerce commemorates his deeds 
with her whitening sails and her laden wharves. Phil- 
anthropy sings the chimes of all public charities, in 
attestation of his munificence. Patriotism sings paens 
for him who, in the hour of the nation's struggle, sent 
the ringing gold of mercy to chime with the flashing 
steel of valor. Unnumbered deeds of private gene- 
rosity attest his secret munificence. Sorrow has found 
solace in his deeds. Despair has been lifted into hope 
by his voice. There are churches whose heaven-kiss- 
ing spires chronicle his donations; schools claim him as 
their patron; hospitals own him as their benefactor. 
He was the supporter of art; science leaned on him 
while her vision swept infinity. The footsteps of pro- 
gress have been sandaled with his silver. He has up- 
held invention while she wrestled with the forces of 
nature. He was the life-blood of enterprise; he was 
the vigor of all progress; he was the epitome and rep- 
resentative of all that was broadening and expansive, 
and uplifting in the life of California. — Thomas Fitch. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 349 

OSCAR L. SHAFTER. 

278. To walk in justice, mercy and humility be- 
fore God, saves the soul. Judge Shafter believed this. 
To say that some special belief or mystical experience 
must be added, he held as the cant of a technical faith. 
He was a devoted worshiper of God. As his writings 
abundantly showed, he was what the church would call 
a man of prayer. At every piece of good news or 
instance of unusual prosperity there is an expression of 
heartfelt thankfulness to the Divine source of blessing. 
When sad tidings came or calamity befel, he turned to 
his closet, his bible and his God, for thought and com- 
fort. And no puritan with his catechism was more 
diligent in the family than he, in inculcating the great 
truths of religion, reverence towards God, and love 
to man. This never ceased until disease broke his 
strength. The world may have given him little credit 
for his religion. He did not wear it on the outside, for 
show. It was in the heart, in the honest doinof of the 
work given him to do, and in quiet deeds of goodness 
to men. The church sometimes called him an infidel. 
His piety did not run in the channel of her ceremonies 
or bear the stamp of her dogmas. Will God reject 
pure love for that reason ? The churches must make 
room for such a man, or that grand day of broader light 
that hastens on will have no room for her. Educate 
a people till they love the truth as well and can see as 
broadly as Judge Shafter did, and they will not go into 
our churcnes as lAey are. Germany is saying this to us 
to-day; Oxford is saying it; Cambridge is saying it; 



350 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Yale is saying it. Every center of learning and supe- 
rior intelligence in Christendom is saying it. The 
guild of scientific men all over the world are saying it, 
with an approach to unanimity that ought to be alarm- 
ing to one who really loves the church, and sees its im- 
portance. It is a question of life and death with the 
church. Her teachers may shut themselves up in their 
little circle of thoughts, and deny that there is any 
broader flow from the Fountain of Eternal Truth, but 
the mightier minds of the world that sweep through 
their lines and out into the ocean that rolls all around 
them, will never, never strike back towards the center 
of darkness and ignorance for the sake of sailing in 
their company. — Rev. L. Hamilton. 



SHAKESPEARE. 

279. More than two centuries have elapsed since 
Shakespeare's Works were first published, and still the 
ages, rolling onward, add greener leaves to the eternal 
amaranth of his fame. The circle of his influence, 
widening and expanding, has extended to lands undis- 
covered in his day, and embraces all the empires of 
the civilized earth. Within the cloistered walls of 
Westminster Abbey, arises a pale forest of monumental 
marble above the ashes of England's illustrious dead. 
Even in that grand mausoleum, no monument erected 
to sovereign, hero, philosopher or statesman, appeals to 
the heart and imagination of the world like the tomb 
which, on the banks of the beautiful Avon, bears the 
immortal name of Shakespeare. — Frank Tilford. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 351 

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 

280. In Shelley's works we have a sufficient basis 
for fruitful study both of the man and of his place in 
literary history. Especially is this basis for study an 
important one, if we wish to consider Shelley with 
reference to the great political and intellectual move- 
ment of his age and ours, the movement to which may 
be applied the one name, the Revolution. As is true 
in case of every individual man, and especially in case 
of any great man, so of Shelley it is true, that wonder- 
ful as the personal qualities of the poet are, they do 
not so much deserve study as do the works and words 
whereby the man influences his Age, embodies its 
thought, and plays a part in its conflicts. 

Human consciousness, both theoretical and practical, 
has in it, two elements, one of ceaseless change, the 
other of permanence. I n so far as all conscious thoughts 
and deeds are in time, each moment is in some measure 
independent of all others, and so human ideas, and acts, 
and purposes, are in reality recreated, made afresh, from 
moment to moment. Ceaseless activity, in some sense 
creative activity, is the universal rule of conscious life. 
Hence simple, passive, submission to tradition is in 
itself not possible. Even the oldest tradition must be 
over and over again restated, and so in a measure re- 
formed, reconstructed from moment to moment, and so 
subject to alteration, yet this tendency to alteration, re- 
sulting from the fact that doctrines and customs do not 
live on from age to age as continuous existences, but 
have to be reborn for every generation, this law of 
change is modified by the other law, the law whereby 



352 CALIFORNIA' ANTHOLOGY. 

in each new effort to formulate doctrine or to readjust 
custom, appeal is made to the past, and conscious effort 
to imitate the past is always to be found. The rebirth 
of old traditions from moment to moment, from age to 
age, in human consciousness, is not a rebirth or remak- 
ing at random, but a deliberate attempt to produce some- 
thing that is like the past. And this second tendency, 
the tendency towards permanence, only gives place to 
the former tendency altogether when new experiences^ 
new problems, in short a new environment, make im- 
possible or intolerable a conscious imitation of past 
traditions. Then we have the phenomenon called 
revolution. The extent and character of the revolu- 
tion depends in any case on the nature of the new 
experiences, on the character of the old traditions, and 
on the activity of the minds concerned. Very common 
in revolution is the effort to appeal from a tradition of 
an age immediately past to the tradition of a long past 
time, or from a complex tradition to a simple one. In 
other words, the tendency towards change is never 
pure and unmixed, but we always find a union, or, better, 
a conflict, between the tendency to permanence and the 
tendency to new constructions. Absolutely conserva- 
tive and absolutely revolutionary movements do not ex- 
ist. The conservative is a revolutionary spirit who 
has succeeded in his revolution and has brought his 
traditions into harmony with his experience. The 
lover of revolution is simply the seeker after a tradi- 
tion in which he may rest; he is desirous of nothing so 
much as a good opportunity to become conservative. 

— Josiah Royce. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 353 

SOCRATES. 

281. A short time since, a lawyer in the Court of 
Athens moved that the sentence of Socrates be reversed 
on the record. It has already been reversed. The 
Judges took the poison in their verdict. To him the 
hemlock was a pledge of earthly immortality. Not a 
particle of his bodily frame is lost. Is that robust soul 
quenched ? Is the Almighty so penurious of matter 
and so careless of mind, that he saves every ounce of 
man's poor body, yet permits a gill of poison utterly to 
extinguish his spirit ? — T/iomas Starr King. 

282. He was a mystic, a fellow with Quakers and 
Swede nborgians, a seer, a saint. He believed truth 
intuitively — he did not investigate it. He believed he 
had a call to his work, that he was empowered by the 
Deity to perform his calling. He had faith in oracles 
and dreams, in supernatural influences and divinations. 
He experienced divine warnings, had spirit-rappings in 
his bosom. He carried a flaming heart hidden under 
his philosophic ice. He would hold a thought and 
inspect it as a mineralogist holds a mineral. He would 
strip off' layer after layer of logic as one peels off the 
plates of mica from a specimen. He was a Jeremy 
Bentham and a George Fox welded into one. — Thomas 
Starr Kijtg. 

GEN. JOHN A. SUTTER. 

283. He was the architect whose hand laid the foun- 
dation of this commonwealth; the patriarch whose voice 



354 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

encouraged those who built its stately fabric. It rarely 
happens that an individual gives form and character 
unto an epoch; yet the life of John Augustus Sutter, 
and the events of his career, exemplify the civilization 
of nearly half a century; that civilization which began 
with the colonial enterprise of a resolute explorer and 
expanded into the formation of a mighty State. As 
Napoleon was the King of the Kings of Europe, so this 
man was the Pioneer of the Pioneers of California. In 
him were manifested all the hardihood, the energy, and 
the courage which distinguished those illustrious pioneers 
of an earlier day, whose achievements have become 
historic. Insensible to peril or privation, he and his 
scanty band of followers forsook the busy haunts of 
men to penetrate into the remotest regions of the West, 
where nature still held solitary sway. He brought the 
lip-ht of culture and refinement into a wilderness whose 
only tenants were the wild beast and the savage. As 
a bulwark against their attacks, whether insidious 
or open, he constructed a rude fort upon the very spot 
where afterward, before his eyes had closed in death, a 
populous city reared its solid structures, and massed its 
teeming life. Impelled by a spirit of enterprise, un- 
tiring and resistless, he extended his operations over a 
wide expanse of territory, until accident revealed the 
startling fact that the soil he cultivated concealed a 
harvest in its bosom, not such alone as responded to 
the customary course of tillage, but a harvest litei'ally 
goldeit. In the land he had chosen for his heritage 
he had realized the Ophir of tradition. — Joseph W. 
Wmans. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 355 

284. In the histories of past ages and nations, 
there are names that will live in enduring remembrance 
while freedom exists on earth. The virtues and patri- 
otism of Epaminondas perpetuate his name as the 
brightest that adorns the history of Theban Independ- 
ence. The courage of Hannibal, whose conquering 
legions traversed the Alps, and overswept the classic 
plains of Italy, is indelibly associated with the unfor- 
gotten glory of Carthage. With Athens is identified 
a galaxy of her brilliant sons, and clusters of constel- 
lated names adorn the coronal of Roman fame. But 
in the cycle of coming years, when the pen of the 
historian shall trace the origin and settlement of this 
occidental commonwealth, shall depict the virtues, the 
sufferings, privations, fortitude and intrepidity at the 
basis of the achievement, shall describe the mighty 
impulse it has given to the progress of free government 
and extension of free principles, and shall glisten the 
truthful page with the names of the heroic founders of 
its fame, there is none that will gem the record with a 
purer or more enduring lustre than the name of the 
immortal Sutter — the illustrious Original of Cali- 
fornia Pioneers. — Col. E. J. C. Kewen, 



WASHINGTON. 

285. Washington was the chief builder of our 
temple of freedom. His principles were liberty and 
the constitution. He fought for liberty, not for itself 
alone, but that we might have a Union to protect us. 



•S56 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

The Union, in his view, was not only a blessing, it was 
the store-house of all the blessings which a free govern- 
ment could dispense to man, and by means of which 
any individual man could rise up to take his place 
among the princes of the earth. Men of the North 
and of the South, Washington was your countryman. 
No sectional feeling animated his breast when he drew 
his sword for liberty on northern soil, or when followed 
by northern soldiers, he tracked the foe through the 
land. He was of the Union and fought for the Union. 

— Edward Stanly. 

286. Of all men who ever lived, I think the 
judgment of his cotemporaries and of posterity is, as it 
will be the judgment of all history, that he never in 
his life yielded to one ignoble or merely sectional 
thought. He yielded the whole of his glorious life, the 
whole of his great heart, the whole of his self-denying, 
wise and majestic nature, to the whole people, of the 
whole country, in all the States, in all the sections, with- 
out distinction of creed, or race, or party, or locality, 
for his own time, and for all time. — Eugene Casserly. 

287. The generality of men do not properly ap- 
preciate the character of Washington. Many feel that 
his talents were not above mediocrity, that his great- 
ness consisted in his goodness, his freedom from am- 
bition, his punctuality and method, his admirable bal- 
ance of faculties — that, in short, destitute of all bril- 
liancy and genius, his qualities were akin to those of 
an "an old fogy." This mistaken idea has perhaps 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 357 

been brought about by the eulogies of mediocrity, drag- 
ging him down its own level; aided perhaps by the 
general dissemination of the engraved portrait by 
Stuart, in which the noble lines of the mouth are dis- 
torted and weakened by a set of false teeth. It is ab- 
surd and dangerous to paint for the popular eye show- 
pictures of stalwart soldiers, or on the other hand, por- 
traits of old men. It would have raised the patriotism 
of the country thirty per cent, to have had as its ideal 
the Washington of 45, as Leutze painted him, crossing 
the Delaware, to make his eagles swoop on Trenton. 
The great eminence of Washington is attributable to 
the tremendous forces of spirit that in his character 
were nicely balanced and harmonized. Stuart, the 
painter, said that every feature of Washington was in- 
dicative of the strongest passions, and yet men have 
come to regard him as the typeof serenebenignity,simply 
a very judicious man. In 1 799, at a dinner party, Wash- 
inton received the news of St. Clair's surprise by the 
Indians, and the bloody massacre which followed. He 
put the dispatches into his pocket and remained tranquil 
until the last guest had departed, and then burst forth 
in a torrent of indignation, which shook him like an 
inward tempest. Then, growing calm, he said in a low 
tone, "Nothing of this; Gen. St. Clair shall have just- 
ice. I will receive him without displeasure; I will hear 
him without prejudice; he shall have full justice." It 
is important that men should have these glimpses 
through refts into the depths of Washington's being, that 
he shall not seem a huge, moral wax statue. It is just as 
important to know that once, in a boat on the Hudson, 



358 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

he threw himself back in a paroxysm of glee, and on 
another occasion, actually rolled on the grass in uncon- 
trollable laughter at a comical story. He once danced 
three hours with Mrs. Gen. Greene, without sitting 
down, and Gen. Greene, not at all jealous, spoke of it 
as "a pretty little frisk." Washington's nature was 
like that of a planet, with massive momentum, and his 
fits of passion were earthquakes, showing the flame 
pent within the planet's granite ribs. 

His greatest service was not military, but civil — the 
work of organizing the Republic. He believed that 
God created this country to be one. The Creator 
placed no Mason and Dixon's line upon it; that was the 
work of foolish men. He marked no boundaries for 
rival civilizations in the immense basins of the West. 
The Mississippi, like a great national tree, has its root 
in the hot gulf, and spreads its top to the far, icy North 
• — a glorious tree, with boughs in different latitudes, 
and branches binding the Rocky Mountains and the 
Lakes together, its great trunk the central artery of a 
national unity. And so Providence seems to have set 
Washington in the core of the national history, as he 
set the Mississippi in the core of the land, to be a per- 
petual force upon the affections of the nation in behalf 
of union. We should feel prouder to be of the 
Nation than of the State. Our feet may stand on local 
soil, but we should cherish the idea that our country is 
bounded on the East by the Atlantic, and on the West 
by the Pacific. — Thos. Starr Kin^. 



DISTINGUISHED MEN. 359 

WASHINGTON AND GARIBALDI. 

288. The life of the Washington of Italy, unlike 
that of the Washington of America, was not always on 
one grade of dignity. He relieved his heroic cam- 
paigns by candle making on Staten Island, and, when 
at the very flood of his career, was " Red Shirt the 
First." In writing the story of Washington, the only 
reliefs to the monotonous dignity of his life, of which 
the writer may legitimately avail himself, are the rare 
glimpses of the foremost of modern men on his farm 
and among the children. But the story of Garibaldi, 
told correctly, furnishes glory and shadow, in all desira- 
ble alternation, action and repose, lofty military bearing 
and candle-dipping — a charmingly varied display, look- 
ing on the canvas more like the master's composition 
than a copy from nature; a specimen of realism lived 
out after the programme of an idealist. — Dr. Franklin 
Tuthill. 




ix:. 



CALIFORNIANA 



PART IX. 



CALIFORNIANA. 



289. Because Commodore Sloat did not rush 
to the execution of the orders issued in anticipation of 
war, on the very first report of a coiHsion between the 
United States and Mexico, the anxious Secretary of 
the Navy, dreading to lose the prize, hotly censured 
him in a letter which reached him after the event had 
broken the sting of its reproaches, and served only to 
assure him how well he had fulfilled the wishes of his 
government. The flag of the United States was no 
sooner flying, than the Collingwood entered the bay of 
Monterey. There had been a race between the Col- 
Im^coood and the Savannah. What a moment was that 
for us, and for the world! What if the Collingwood had 
been the swifter sailer, and Sloat had found the English 
flag flying on the shore! What if we had been born 
on another planet! The cast was for England or the 
United States, and when the die turned for us, the in- 
terest was at an end. — Edmund Randolph. 

24 



■3G2 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

^90. California in full possession of the white man 
and embraced within the mighty area of his civilization! 
We feel the sympathies of our race attract us. We see 
in our great movement hitherward in 1849 a likeness 
to the times when our ancestors, their wives and little 
ones, and all their stuff in wagons, and with attendant 
herds, poured forth by nations and in never-ending col- 
umns from the German forests, and went to seek new 
pastures and to found new kingdoms in the ruined 
provinces of the Roman Empire; or, when swayed by 
another inspiration, they cast their masses upon the 
Saracens, and sought to rescue the Sepulchre of Christ 
from the infidels. We recognize that we are but the 
foremost rank of the multitude which for centuries has 
held its unwavering course out of Europe upon America, 
in numbers still increasing; a vast, unnumbered host, 
self-marshaled, leaderless, and innumerable, moving on- 
ward forever, to possess and people another continent; 
separated but in space, divided but by the accidents of 
manners, of language and of laws — from Scandinavia 
to California — one blood and one people. Man of our 
race has crowned the earth with its gloryl Knowledge 
is but the conservation of his thoughts, art but the em- 
bodiment of his conceptions, letters the record of his 
deeds. And still in the series of his works we have 
founded a State. May it be great and powerful whilst 
the ocean shall thunder against these shores. We have 
planted a people; may they be prosperous and happy 
whilst summers shall return to bless these fields with 
plenty. And may the name of the Pioneer be spoken 
in California forever! — Edmund Randolph. 



CALIFORNIANA. 363 

291. It is wonderful how little of vulear avarice, 
or even of the just and prudent intention to improve 
their fortunes, had to do with the earlier immig-rants to 
California. Theirs was the antiquated Homeric spirit. 
It was their pride and boast— and the memory of their 
contemporaries and the enduring result proves the fact 
— that they were able to win the greatest of all tri- 
umphs, the victory over themselves; that they were 
able to preserve order without law; that they were able 
to maintain justice without tribunals; that their posses- 
sion of absolute personal independence never degenera- 
ted into selfishness, nor the almost savage liberty of a 
country without law, into cruelty or oppression. Shall 
we, who, in conscious fulfilment of a great mission, 
brought method out of chaos, and cultivated the flowers 
of justice and safety in the soil of anarchy — yield to 
lesser dangers and baser temptations ? Shall we soil 
the splendor of the past ? — Edward C. Marshall. 

A Girlish Cleopatra. 

292. And what shall be California's efilgy? As- 
suredly woman; that soft, round, poetic bundle of vo- 
luptuous sensibility, that bankrupted nature in the mak- 
ing. But what class and quality of that sweet gender.-* 
Not as a sovereign do we see her, howsoever enthroned 
between the Sierra and the sea, or howsoever some- 
time she shall queen it over West and East; not yet as 
fine lady, or peasant, or prudish spinster, or staid 
matron, even though she be mother of men. Not as 
Hippolyte, the war-god's daughter, shall we personate 
her, or other Amazonian breast-cutter; she is too virgin 



364 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and amiable for fighting-. Not as Sheba, to probe 
with hard questions any Solomon; wit and wisdom are 
not to be despised, but the chink of gold is more satis- 
fying than any words, though accompanied by the mu- 
sic of the spheres. Not as Pandora, for though all- 
gifted, she never was created to bring misery upon men. 
If for California's fit representation we must have a 
goddess, perhaps Athene, who now graces her seal, is 
as proper a personage as any. Springing all armored 
into being, appearing at once as the protectress of men 
and of women, of arts and agriculture and government, 
with wisdom and power harmoniously blended, and 
more ethical in her character than any of the deities, 
she presents more perfectly the ideal of a healthful, 
vigorous minded, and progressive people. 

Too perfectly, in fact. Minerva is a noble creation;; 
but for California's incarnation I should choose flesh 
more wanton, more sensuous, less intellectual, less se- 
verely chaste, more artless. Indeed, I should not trouble 
the Olympian divinities at all for my prototype, but take 
from some lesser hill a creature nearer me in warm, 
palpitating humanity; not so lofty as to be lost in un- 
-? reality, nor yet so prosaic that her simple presence 
should not act upon me like a medicine. She should 
be large, and supple-limbed; low browed, with a flood 
of golden hair veiling her exquisitely moulded form; 
deep blue eyes, whose dreamy languor a merry reck- 
lessness sadly should disturb; nose and chin Grecian; 
ripe, luxurious lips, parted by a breath of almost visible 
fragrance; while expression, voice, and attitude should all 
betoken an indolent, romantic nature, overflowing witli 



CALIFORNIANA. 365 

high, exultant spirits. A thousand years hence, the 
patron goddess of Athens may be CaHfornia's appro- 
priate model; but to-day she is a girlish Cleopatra, 
rather than a full-fledged Minerva. — Hubert H. Ban- 
croft. 

293. — Sunrise from the Sierras. 
The gentle lustre of the morning star; 
The sweet submission in its fading rays; 
The rising radiance of the golden bar, 
The eastern sky in grayish fields displays: 
The leaping up, from some great sea of fire. 
Of mighty lances of resistless light, — 
Betokening the Day- King's fierce desire 
With martial pomp to slay the hosts of night. 

— Charles A. Sumner. 

294. Our Duty and Destiny. — Each age in 
the history of the world has received its enlighten- 
ment from some central point. Light first shone 
in the fabled regions of the East, and the birth-place 
of the race was the starting point of its intellectual 
illumination; thence through the mysterious schools 
and priestcrafts of Egypt; through the delicate 
philosophies of Greece; through the Pantheism, unbe- 
lief and brutal force of ancient Rome ; through the 
martyrdoms, councils and hierarchies of modern Rome; 
through Germany, France and England — this light at 
last has reached to us. It has crossed four continents; 
it has traveled six thousand years, and returns now to 
greet us at the very portals of its starting point. This 
light is the light of civilization, of progress, of religion, 



366 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of the arts and sciences, of all useful improvements, of 
all ameliorations in the conditions of men ; it is the 
light of knowledge, humanity, love and power; it is the 
sum of all experiences ; the epitome of all histories ; 
the grand result of all that the human race has ever 
said, or thought, or done. We look across a narrow 
sea and behold in the forms of government, modeled 
upon the patriarchal, and assuming naturally the des- 
potic, in the doctrines of the Brahmins and the moral 
teachings of Confucius, that state of society, morals 
and religfion, almost without a changfe, which existed 
in the first ages, and which has been constantly modi- 
fied, enlarged and illuminated in its western progress, 
until it has reached us such as we find it to-day. 
The sun does not go backwards. We stand at the 
outer verge of this course, midway between the East 
and the West — the interpreter between the old and the 
new, the living and the dead. 

From us, and not back again over the weary course 
which it has traversed for six thousand years — from us 
must come the inspiration and the light which shall re- 
vivify and re-glorify the worn-out nations of "the land 
of the East, and the clime of the sun." 

For this grecit destiny, I fondly hope that we are a 
peculiar and a chosen people. I hope still more fondly 
that California will be fitted and prepared to stamp upon 
the age impress of an influence no less happy than 
grand — the impress of a free and imperial race. 

— JudgeT. W. Freelon, 



CALIFORNIANA. 367 

29B. We cannot, if we would, separate our pride 
in OLir own State from our love of all the States. When, 
in mental contemplation, we behold our beloved Cali- 
fornia in the Pantheon of the Nations, her majestic 
form reclined upon her mountain couch of gold, and 
the rippling- tide of a mighty ocean toying with her 
marble feet, we see her surrounded by the grand figures 
of her sisters — composing a group the admiration and 
delight of the peoples. Already we boast that we 
are citizens, not of a single State, but of a wondrous 
Empire, extending from the blue lakes, which part us 
from the British Dominion, to the great Gulf of the 
South ; from the Atlantic-beaten cliffs of farthest Maine 
to where the surges of the Pacific lave the cleft moun- 
tains of our own beautiful Golden Gate. Soon may 
generous legislation and fraternal love produce their 
natural result — unending harmony within our borders. 
May all hearts, throughout the vast expanse of our 
territory, respond in sympathetic unison to the electric 
thrill of every living thought, every noble impulse, so 
that — old disputes ended, old quarrels healed — there 
shall be no rivalry between the citizens of our dear 
country, save the rivalry of self-denial, magnanimity 
and patriotism. Long years hence, when our children 
shall celebrate the returning anniversary of this day, 
the last of the Pioneers, with bent form and whitened 
locks, shall take the place of honor amongst them. 
And as he shall hear a speaker, more worthy of the 
theme and the occasion, rehearse the eventful story of 
his contemporaries, it will be the old man's proudest 
reminiscence that he, too, performed his part in ex- 



368 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

tending the foundations of that great Temple of Lib- 
erty, whose base shall be a continent; beneath whose 
protecting shadow shall dwell, in peace and prosperity, 
a hundred millions of freemen ; and the glory of whose 
summit shall illumine a world. 

— Judge E. W. McKinstry. 

296. — El Rio Sacramento. — 

Where ice-clad summits greet the morn. 
And where the beetling crags look down 
On dark blue lakes with sullen frown. 
This bantling of the clouds is born; 
Forth from its granite cradle creeps. 
At first in play it laughs and leaps, 
And then in dusky pools it sleeps. 
Down silent, sunless glens it glides, 
And under long sedge grasses hides, 
Where aspen leaves, like quivering wings, 
Quaver above its hidden springs. 

Anon, in silver-sheeted falls, 

It leaps the terraced mountain walls, 

And tumbles into rocky urns, 

Beflecked with foam and fringed with ferns. 

At last this half-grown infant, fed 
By melting snow and falling rain. 
Like bruin chafing with his chain. 
Growls hoarsely in its granite bed. 
And plows its pathway to the plain. 
Meanwhile, by some designing will, 



CALIFORNIANA. 369 

Harnessed and schooled, it turns the mill, 
And with its ponderous sledge unlocks 
The concrete coffers of the rocks. 

In middle summer, lank and lean, 

It creeps, the shelving rocks between. 

And then in spring and autumn tide, 

Crimson with carnage, flushed with pride, 

In serried ranks of gleaming pikes, 

It dashes on the yielding dikes, 

And breaks the ramparts, rushing down 

Upon defenceless farm and town. 

In tamer moods, content to hold 
By croft and thorp, by field and fold, 
Past orchard boughs and bending grain, 
Past grazing herds and loaded train, 
Past children laughing at their play, 
The tedious tenor of its way. 

In ceaseless, silent sweep, between 
Low lying meadows, rank and green, 
Along the marge of bastioned banks. 
Its dimpled face reflects the ranks 
Of graybeard oaks; its liquid kiss 
Thrills all the river reeds with bliss. 
The thirsty fibrils of the vine 
Reach down to quaff its amber wine; 
The grasses and the willows lave 
Their tangled tresses in its wave. 
The silver cord has grown to be 
A mother avalanche set free — 



370 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Its paths the highway of the world, 
Where sails of commerce are unfurled, 
Emblem of Time's resistless tide. 
On, and still on, its currents glide, 
Until, at length, far, far below, 
It weds the sea with stately flow. 

— Gen. L. H. Foote. 

297. San Francisco. — Our modern civilization is 
a three-fold product. From Rome we get our concrete 
logic, and the theory and practice of our legislation. 
From Athens our modes of thought, and the taste for 
the beautiful and the true. From Judea our morals, 
and that idea of the equality of men in the sight of God, 
which has resulted in that political equality which we 
call democracy. 

Rome had her Capitol. There were her archives; 
her Sibylline oracles, her treasury, her mint; the spoils 
she had taken in war; the Sabine wolf, the symbol of 
her origin; the temples of the Capitoline Jove, of Juno, 
and of Minerva. 

Athens had her Acropolis. There were deposited 
her laws; her revenues; the busts of her founders; the 
portraits of her heroes; the images of her gods; the 
wonderful statue of her protectress, Minerva. 

Jerusalem had her double hill, where were her temple; 
the altar of the unseen God, the Holy of Holies; the 
City of the King; the treasury; the citadel; and the 
Courts of Justice. 

It may therefore be regarded as an instinct of civili- 
zation that every enlightened people should select some 



CALIFORNIANA. 371 

favored spot, and stamp it as the centre of its power, 
by the erection of monuments which symbolize at once 
its advancement, its institutions, its culture, its taste, 
and its hopes for the future. And such an event is a 
great one. 

In such a presence I cannot turn back to the past 
and recount what we and our comrades have done. 
[Address at laying of the corner-stone of the New City 
Hall, San Francisco, February 226., 1872 — Editor.] 
I seem rather to be rapt into the presence of the great 
future. I am not unmindful of that great immigration, 
unprecedented in all history, which set down at once 
three hundred thousand men, with all the training, 
wants and aspirations of the highest civilization, in the 
desert wastes of California; we found ourselves a mere 
military colony, outside of the guaranties of the Fed- 
eral Constitution, and our very laws written in a foreign 
tongue. We were in the midst of chaos, but we knew 
that the whirling forces were the elements of empire. 
We felt the spirit moving on the face of the waters, 
and were sure that the dry land of the continent would 
soon appear. 

On this occasion we cast behind us all that we have 
achieved, all that we have suffered, during the past 
twenty-five years. The fires and floods, the paralysis 
of panic, the intestine struggles, in which the higher 
law of self-preservation was indicated by the tempo- 
rary suspension of the law of routine — these are suffer- 
ings which live only in memory, and no longer in feel- 
ing, and whose recollections produce even a sad pleas- 
ure. Not so the thought that so many of our com- 



372 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

rades have perished by the way. The very soil upon 
which we stand [the old cemetery, reclaimed from the 
dead and made the site of the beautiful New City 
Hall — Editor.] is sown with the bones of some of the 
noblest Pioneers that ever cast their lives in the balance 
to win the destiny of Empire; while we, not braver nor 
more worthy, stand in the presence of that future 
in which they, too, believed, and to which we, bending 
over their graves, now give a new date, and of which 
we thus make ourselves a part. So looked the great 
leader of Israel from his mountain hight upon the 
Promised Land. So looked Columbus, with earnest, 
straining gaze, upon the New World which he gave to 
civilization. So looked out Cortez and Pizarro upon 
the great Southern Sea. 

But we have accomplished more than these men 
did. We are in possession of the Promised Land. We 
have found the way to India, which Columbus thought 
he had discovered, but which he never reached. We 
have made conquests in the Pacific Ocean of which 
Cortez and Pizarro never dreamed. Commerce is the 
queen of nations. Hers is the Universal Empire, It 
knows neither geographical nor political limits. To 
her, both civilization and barbarism bring their tributes. 
Throned upon the land, she wields her scepter over the 
most distant sea. 

In 1850, we looked at the future of San Francisco 
with the same assured hope which we cherish to-day. 
And yet at that time we believed that the placers 
would be exhausted, as they have been ; we had no hint 
of the precious veins in the rocky ribs of the Sierras; 



CALIFORNIANA. 373 

nor did we hope that ours could ever be an agricultural 
State; but we looked at our glorious bay, mighty 
enough to receive the fleets of all nations; at the vast 
Pacific Coast, as yet virgin to systematic commerce; 
and at the great islands and continent of the Southern 
Sea, and boldly wrested from the oracles of destiny, a 
prediction of the future greatness of our city. 

Not unto us be the glory; "The Lord hath built the 
house; the Lord hath kept the city." He hath given 
commerce as her sustenance and her strength. She is 
not great and poweifful, nor will she be enduring in her 
strength because she is the metropolis of California, 
but because she is the metropolis of the whole Pacific 
Coast and of the Great Southern Sea. And because she 
is so great in this element of strength, she is, in this, 
greater than the State itself She is more necessary to 
the State than the State is to her. She is the great 
entrepot of the Pacific Ocean, the great point of recep- 
tion and distribution, and such she would still be, though 
she were built like Venice, on a few sandy islands; or 
like Petra, in a desert; or like Tyre, upon a rock. 

Oh, People of California, cherish San Francisco! 
She is not merely one of your jewels, but she is the 
very crown of your glory, all gold and jewels. You 
cannot control her destiny, although you may impede 
her march. You may make of the State a cattle past- 
ure, and give it a mock legislature which shall repre- 
sent beasts and not men; you may tax her commerce 
and retard her development ; but you cannot defeat 
her destiny. Or you may cherish her as your first and 
noblest born ; you may people her outlying valleys with 



374 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

a happy and cultivated population, and plant with dwel- 
lings, school-houses and churches, the wastes which 
now resound only with the tread of cattle and the bel- 
lowing of brutes; you may give her a free port; and, 
above all, you may let her alone, with her limbs un- 
swathed and strength unaided, to work out her high 
destiny. So shall she be for untold ages, the Queen 
City of the vast Southern Sea. Into her lap Commerce 
shall pour the treasures of the Pacific, while her heart re- 
sponds to the electric pulsations of the great continents 
and empires washed by the boundless oceans of the 
West. Here to-day we have marked and consecrated 
the centre of her legislation ; of her executive 
and financial administration; of her educational institu- 
tions; and of her administration of justice. 

The day is auspicious. It is the anniversary of the 
birth of Washington, the only one who has given to 
history the patriot's name, without tarnish and without 
reproach ; the serene sky spreads above us, mild and 
beneficent, the symbol of hope and peace; the eternal 
hills, in their varied beauty, seem to promise endurance 
to our work; the ever-moving sea presents an em- 
blem of the unrest, the ceaseless activity, and the 
ultimate success of our commercial empire. 

— John W. Dwinelle, 



THE MODOC STRONG-HOLD. 

298. The Lava Beds are of historical interest. As 
the scenes of Modoc triumphs they will ever claim the 



CALIFORNIANA. 375 

attention of the civilized world. Seventy warriors, en- 
cumbered with women and children to the nnmber ot 
two hundred, had defied the United States Govern- 
ment for months and months, killed and wounded 
soldiers equal to three times the number of their own 
fighting force, and again and again repulsed attacking 
parties consisting of several hundred regular soldiers. 
I recall to mind no instance in ancient or modern war- 
fare surpassing in rude heroism the desperate defense 
made by the Modocs. Their success, of course, was 
largely due to the fact that the soldiers were not famil- 
iar with the ramifications and sinuosities of the beds. 
The Modoc Lava Beds (there are other lava beds in 
Oregon, Idaho and Arizona) are situated northeast 
from Yreka, Siskiyou County, California, about fifty- 
three miles in an air line. The distance is over eighty 
miles by road. The beds proper have a width of ten 
miles north and south, and run east and west fifteen 
miles. They are bounded on the north by Rhett Lake, 
half of which sheet of water is in Oregon. The old 
emigrant road, familiar to many who crossed the plains 
in early days, skirts the eastern side of the beds. To 
the south is a nameless range of mountains. The 
western boundary is a bluff which continues north along 
the western shore of the lake. It is a rocky bluff, its 
face nearly a sheer precipice, and from the level of the 
beds to its summit the distance is five hundred and 
eighty-six feet. The bluff is th(^, coigne of vantage in 
viewing the beds. The entire lava country is com- 
passed in a sweeping glance. Looking over the beds 
with the naked eyes, they appear to consist of an undu- 



376 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

lating plain. The sight is uninviting because of the 
general suggestion of desolation. A forsaken region 
is the impression left upon the mind. No trees are 
seen in the immediate foreground, and those in the dis- 
tance are dwarfed into bushes. The counterpart of this 
apparent plain may be seen along the ocean shore of 
New England. Let grounded sea-weed represent the 
dark lines twisting through the bed, and the picture is 
complete. The gentle undulations, as they appear from 
a distance, the waving grass and bushes, the lights and 
shadows cast on the surface by passing clouds, are in 
strict keeping with a beach landscape. The white, 
pumice-strewn shore of Tule Lake makes the resem- 
blance most complete. I know the beds of old. To 
me the dark lines are something more formidable than 
soa-weed. Every one of them recalls to memory 
adventures more or less disagreeable. Away in the 
east, distant three miles as the crow flies, is a long, dark, 
ragged line — Jack's famous strong-hold. 

It is assumed that the beds were once occupied by 
an active volcano. Through a freak of nature the 
volcano sunk into the earth during an eruption, and 
left upon the surface a sea of seething lava. The lava 
fused the rock with which it came in contact, and, as a 
rule, caused a complete metamorphosis. The primary 
rocks were stratified in new and curious forms. The 
formations exposed are of trachyte and basalt. Every 
ledge, so far as I observed, was mineralized with iron. 
Rock from the ledges is heavy and very tenacious. 
The rim of the beds is from fifty to one hundred yards 
in width, and consists of chunks of lava and lava dust. 



CALIFORNIANA. 377 

The lava in the rim is of a h'ght brown color, occasion- 
ally bordering on white, and weighs little more than 
pumice stone. The tough lava of which the beds are 
mainly composed is black, or has a bluish shade, accord- 
ing to locality. The loose pieces of lava on the out- 
skirts of the beds indicate that the coating, as before 
suggested, was once in a liquid state. The fragments 
are porous and curved. Each had its place in the huge 
bubbles of the lava sea. There are immense numbers 
of funnel-like outlets, in which steam has been gene- 
rated below and gas exploded, the openings being small 
at the bottom and large at the top, with crevices around. 
Where the steam has not exploded strongly enough to 
blow the rocks entirely clear, and has left these funnels, 
it has upheaved the rocks and allowed them to fall back 
loosely, so as to form immense heaps. 

The true character of the Lava Beds cannot be 
learned by inspection from afar. Nothing but close 
acquaintance will inform the visitor. Pass inside of the 
rim and you fail to find a level spot. Every rock stands 
on end, and exposes angular points. When the war 
began, the Indians were scattered along the western 
border. After several battles they suddenly vanished 
as by magic. It was supposed that they had fled to a 
distant locality. A reconnoissance developed them in 
what was aptly termed the back-bone of the beds, or 
Captain Jack's strong-hold. This bone consists of a 
nob of giant ledges in the northeastern portion of the 
lava section. These ledges crop out boldly and have 
no special course. The best defined ledge generally 

trends north and south. The lesser ledges run nearly 
25 



S78 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

parallel at times, and again cut in at right angles. The 
mean level of the beds is below that of the lake. As 
you draw near the stronghold it becomes necessary to 
descend into irregular chasms. Before you have time 
to study the topography of the place, ledges loom up 
fifty and sixty feet high, directly in front, and all but 
compel a halt. The savages, pressed by the troops, 
retired from ledge to ledge, and each retreat carried 
them to higher ground and gave them additional ad- 
vantages. The strong-hold proper is about the sum- 
mit of several of the boldest ledges. They radiate 
from a common center and are difficult of access. Along 
the top of each ledge is a natural channel three or four 
feet in depth, wherein the cunning savage can skulk 
and shoot and still remain unseen. The channels are 
complicated and labyrinthian. Modocs had dwelt 
here for ages, so said tradition, and yet the followers of 
Jack would not trust to memory as they moved about. 
They failed to feel securely familiar with this pile of 
rocks two hundred yards square, and had the different 
channels marked by bits of wood! The rocks are not 
adapted to cave formations. The caves mentioned in 
war telegrams are spacious basins occurring in the solid 
rock. Those in the strong-hold are one hundred or 
more feet in circumference, and have a depth of fifty 
feet. Overhanging rocks furnish a few of these caves 
with what might be termed incomplete roofing. Jack's 
band made a stand in the strong-hold, and played sad 
havoc with assailing parties. One night the water in 
the strong-hold gave out. The only convenient source 
of supply was the lake, distant one mile. Between the 



CALIFORNIANA. 379 

Strong-hold and the lake was a line of soldiers. Before 
morning the Modocs fled from this rocky fastness to 
the southern end of the beds, where Hasbrouck finally 
gave them so much trouble. 

Five miles south of Rhett Lake, and in the south- 
eastern portion of the lava deposit, are two bold buttes, 
united by a narrow tongue of black lava, which are of 
pure scoria. Each of these buttes has a crater at its 
crest. Close at hand are a number of lava buttes, with 
craters. All of these buttes combined could not have 
made the overflow constituting the beds, albeit the lips 
of the craters have been cut by streams of lava which 
cooled in the shadowy past. The marvelous power of 
nature, as exemplified in the configuration of the rocks 
about these buttes, and the lines of demarkation be- 
tween fusion complete and arrested, make a lasting im- 
pression upon the most superficial beholder. There is 
an appalling sublimity in the sight which one cannot 
shake off. The surface of the earth is in ruins here. 
Tree, plant and grass are absent. The lava is sombre 
black. There are bottomless fissures from one to two 
feet in width and miles in length. There are broad 
chasms over one hundred feet deep. There are per- 
fect i'.rches — keystone and all — suggesting remnants of 
a Reman temple. There are odd forms and profiles 
which would do credit to a gifted sculptor. The ledges 
often lie parallel, like so many dark, forbidding waves, 
each ledge dotted with circular, sharp-edged hollows. 
The striking characteristics of this wonderful home of 
the Modocs were outlined in my mind as I stood on 
the bluff that night. But darkness wrapped the beds 



380 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

in a pall, ahd I retired to a welcome couch on Mother 
Earth. — Wm. M. Btmker. 

299. Our Duty and Destiny. — The poet's Gol- 
den Aofe is lost from sisfht in the mists of Fable, and 
hid by centuries of war and crime ; but the Age of 
Ages, the Song of Songs, lies before us, brought nearer 
by each changeful year. The world, which began with 
a Garden of Eden, shall complete the cycle, and come 
once more to be a garden as fair as that lost, angel-guard- 
ed beauty. Nations, it may be, shall yet unite their wealth 
and energy to reclaim the historic deserts of Asia, to 
replant the treeless wastes, to revive the dead rivers 
and rebuild the fallen cities of the East. Here in Cali- 
fornia, we too, have deserts to plant with palms, and 
naked mountains to clothe with cypress and pine. There 
are swamps and malarial regions to be reclaimed with 
Eucalyptus, and red lands to be covered with orchards 
and vineyards. There is room for many more homes 
and industries. Our most fertile valleys must sustain a 
much greater population, and in the course of time 
become beautiful beyond expression. Wheat-culture 
will in a measure pass to newer States and virgin soil, 
and the sceptre of grain will leave our hands. Our 
large ranches will be divided and subdivided, and we 
shall enter upon a period of unclouded prosperity, 
founded on diversified interests and the highest de- 
velopment of horticulture in all its branches. 

To this future, then, we look. Southern Europe is 
in many respects our type and example. Whatever 
Greece, Italy and Spain were in their noblest days, that 



CALIFORNIANA. 381 

we, also, hope to become, except that as oilr facilities 
are greater, so our mingling of the beauties of a world 
may be greater. A cosmopolitan people, not narrow 
or prejudiced, strong, earnest, truthful, original; state- 
builders, home-lovers, believers in education, full of 
nature's naturalness — this is that end to which we of a 
ruder, more fertile age must toil, setting our faces 
toward the morning. Our State is not a tent of the 
Saxon race, pitched hastily by this western ocean, but a 
temple rising in the sight of all men. It is not yet 
finished; the pioneers of '49 hewed monolithic stones, 
fit for a new Temple of the Sun. Here the great shall 
worship when, ages hence, the story we are now begin- 
ning shall be continued in the deeds of our children; 
when our ancestral oaks, now just planted, shall become 
hoary monarchs tottering to their fall; when the new 
walls of our young University shall be as gray and 
venerable as classic Oxford. Let us patiently do the 
work of to-day, so that our rude beginnings shall not 
be useless, but linked with past and future. These 
rivers and lakes, the beautiful bay of San Francisco, 
the lonely cliffs, the pallid snow-peaks, shall all be parts 
of a classic clime. It is man's labor and heroic deeds 
which put a new and more divine seal to Nature's 
fairest scenes. Mount Shasta, in its translucent majesty 
shall out-rival Mont Blanc; our Sierras shall awaken 
nobler poems than Alps or Appenines. So shall these 
western shores become lands of cultured groves and 
gardens, and horticultural triumphs, linked closely with 
Art, Literature, and the multiplied pursuits of a refined 
and powerful race. — Charles H. Shinn. 



382 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

30O. 'California Humorists. — California, during 
this quarter-century, has produced more humorists, and 
more of that Hterature which is essentially humorous, 
than all the rest of the country. It may be difficult to 
trace to any outward sources the inspiration of so much 
wit. Does it lie in the odd contrasts and strange situa- 
tions which so often confront the observer here? Nor 
has this facetiousness depended at all for its develop- 
ment upon any degree of prosperity. In fact, the 
boldest and bravest challenge which has ever been 
given to adverse fortune here, has been by the gentle 
humorists who have suffered from her slings and arrows. 
It is said, " Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." 
But these modern satirists made faces at bad fortune; 
they lampooned her and defied her to do her utmost. 
The more miserable they ought to have been, the 
happier they were. They found a grotesque and comic 
side to the most sober facts. They were facetious 
when there was small stock in the larder and smaller 
credit at the bankers. They smiled at the very grimness 
of evil fortune until she fled, and, in doing this, they 
half-unconsciously tickled the midriff of the world. A 
ripple of laughter ran over the surface of society. It 
sometimes made slow progress when it here and there 
met a mountain of obtuseness. But wit is wit ; and 
what difference does it make if, failing to see the point, 
some people laugh next year instead of this ? I will 
not be distressed because my friend does not, to this 
day, see how the immortal "Squibob" conquered his 
adversary at San Diego by falling underneath him and 
inserting his nose between his teeth. Nor does it 



CALIFORNIANA. 383 

greatly concern me that he does not assent to the 
proposition that John Phoenix, having made a national 
reputation by editing the San Diego Herald for one 
week, was the greatest journalist of modern times. If 
reputation is the measure of greatness. Phoenix is to 
this day without a peer. He made the very desert 
sparkle with his wit. He was a humorous comet, shoot- 
ing across the horizon of pioneer life. Men looked up 
and wondered whence it came and whither it had gone. 
Possibly, there is something favorable to the play of 
humor in a greater freedom from conventional limita- 
tions. If one grows into this larger liberty, or is 
translated into it, a flavor of freshness comes to per- 
vade all his intellectual life. A certain spontaneity of 
expression, a spring, a rioting song of gladness, are 
some of the signs of this more abounding life. In 
homely phrase, we say there is a flavor of the soil 
about it. It might, therefore, have been necessary, that 
Mark Twain should sleep on this soil, and should 
have a wide range of pioneer experience, before he 
could become the prince of grotesque humorists. He 
got up suddenly from the very soil which in its secret 
laboratory colors the olive and the orange, and began 
to make the world launch. With a keen sense of the 
symmetry and harmony of things, he had a keener 
perception of all the shams and ridiculous aspects of 
life. His pungent gospel of humor is as sanitary as a 
gentle trade wind. Pie knew a better secret than the 
old alchemists. Every time he made the world laugh, 
he put a thousand ducats into his pocket. But never 
until he had slept in his blankets, had been robbed on 



S84 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

the " Divide," and had learned the deUcate cookery of 
a miner's cabin, could he do these things. But now he 
cannot even weep at the tomb of his ancestor, Adam> 
without moving the risibles of half the world. He has 
also a finer touch and flavor, not of the rankest soil, 
but of that which gives the aroma and delicate bouquet 
to the rarest mountain-side vintage. When this man 
had tried his wit on a California audience, and had won 
an approving nod, he had an endorsement that was 
good in any part of the English-speaking world. 

Of a more subtile wit and a finer grain was 
Harte, who did his best work as a humorist in 
California. All his earlier triumphs were won here. 
His subsequent endorsement in a wider field was 
only an affirmation of this earlier public judgment. 
Sometimes in the thicket, one may come upon a wild 
mocking-bird which is running up the gamut of its 
riotous burlesque upon the song of every other bird, 
and the sound of every living thing in the forest. But 
when all this is done, that mocking-bird will sometimes 
give out a song which none other can match with its 
melody. As much as this, and more, lay within the 
range of this poet-satirist. His mocking had, however, 
a deep and salient meaning in it. When Truthful 
James rises to explain in what respect Ah Sin is peculiar, 
he has a higher purpose than merely to show the over- 
reaching cunning of this bronzed heathen, " with the 
smile that was child-like and bland." When the sup- 
posed pliocene skull, found in Calaveras County, had 
developed a good deal of scientific quackery, Harte, in 
his "GeoloQ-ical Address," makes the skull declare that 



CALIFORNIANA. 385 

it belonged to Joe Bowers, of Missouri, who had fallen 
down a shaft. For six months thereafter no theorist 
was able to discuss the character of that fossil with a 
sober countenance. No Damascus blade ever cut with 
a keener stroke than did the blade of this satirist, even 
when it was hidden in a madrigal or concealed in some 
polished sentence of prose. 

As a humorist, he appreciated humor in others. 
When Dickens died, not another man in all the length 
and breadth of the land contributed so tender and 
beautiful a tribute to his memory as did Harte in his 
poem of " Dickens in Camp." It was left to this shy 
man, who came forth from the very wastes of this far- 
off wilderness, to lay upon the bier of the dead humorist 
as fragrant an offering as any mortal fellowship could 
suggest. It was a song in a different key — as if one 
having entered into the very life of the great novelist, 
had also for a moment entered into his death. 

Another humorist, radically the product of California, 
was Prentice Mulford. When it was found that he 
had a genuine vein of wit in him, recognized alike in 
the brilliant salon and the miner's camp, he was sent 
forth as another missionary to reclaim the world. 

The wit and the poetry which ripen here are under 
the same sun which ripens the pomegranate and the 
citron. The grain and texture have always been better 
than that suggested by the coarser materialism without. 
It is little to him who is cutting his marble to the di- 
vinest form, that the whole city reeks with grime and 
smoke, and all its outlines are ugly and misshapen. It 



38 G CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

is little to poet or painter that sometimes the earth has 
only a single tint of gray, since he may also see in con- 
trast what a transfigured glory there may be on moun- 
tain and on sea. 

There are not at any time, in this dull world, so many 
genuine humorists as one may count on his fingers. 
For lack of some healthy laughter the world is going 
to the bad. It welcomes the gentle missionary of hu- 
mor, and for lack of him it often accepts those dreary 
counterfeits who commit assault and battery on our 
mother tongue. As in olden times the prophets were 
sometimes stoned in their own country, so in modern 
times one cannot tell whether the poet-prophet, who 
comes up from the wilderness, will fare better or worse. 
Woe to him if the people cannot interpret him, or are 
piqued at his coming. 

None of us would be comfortable with only some 
pungent sauce for dinner; but when a dreadful stale- 
ness overtakes the world, it is ready to cry out, "More 
sauce!" Whoever comes, therefore, bringing with him 
salt and seasoning, and whatever else gives a keener 
zest to life, never comes amiss. Sooner or later we 
shall know him. He will come very near to us in his 
books, and by that subtle law of communion which, 
through the brightest and noblest utterances, makes all 
the better world akin. 

After we have seen the tricks of the magician, we 
do not care to know him any more; but the magician 
of wit works by an enchantment that we can never 
despise. His spell is wrought with such gifts as are 



CALIFORNIANA. 387 

only given from the very heavens to, here and there, 
one. It is not the mythical Puck who is to put a girdle 
round the world, but the man of genius, whose thought 
is luminous with the light of all ages. So Shakespeare 
clasps the world, and Dickens belts it, and the men of 
wit and genius furnish each a golden thread which girds 
it about. The book of humor is the heart's ease. In 
every library it is dog-eared, because it has in it some 
surcease for the secret ills of life. If a million souls 
have been made happier for an hour through the fic- 
tions of Sir Walter Scott, what is the sum of good 
thus wrought! What lesser good have they wrought 
who have come in later times to lighten the dead 
weight of our over- weighted lives? — W. C, Bartlett. 



AUTHORSHIP IN CALIFORNIA. 

801. The exacting conditions of pioneer life are 
not favorable to authorship. If, during this quarter of 
a century, not a book had been written in California, we 
might plead, in mitigation, the overshadowing material- 
ism which, while coarsely wrestling for the gains of a 
day, finds no place for that repose which favors culture 
and is fruitful of books. But over the arid plains, in 
the heat and dust of the long summer, one may trace 
the belt of green which the mountain-stream carries 
sheer down to the sea. So there have been many 
thoughtful men and women who have freshened and 
somewhat redeemed these intellectual wastes. They 



888 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

have written more books in this quarter of a century 
than have been written in all the other States west of 
the Mississippi River. The publication of some 
of these books has cost nearly their weight in gold. 
During the period of twenty-five years, more than 
ninety volumes have been written by persons living at 
the time in this State. 

No one has sought to live here exclusively by author- 
ship. It has only been the incidental occupation of 
those persons who have written out of the fullness of 
their own lives. If they heard no mysterious voice 
saying unto them: "Write!" — the great mountains 
encamped about like sleeping dromedaries, the valleys 
filled with the aroma of a royal fruitage, the serene 
sky, and the rhythm of the great sea — all make audible 
signs to write. They have written out of a fresh, new 
life. 

It is this large acquaintance with Nature — this lying 
down with the mountains until one is taken into their 
confidence — that may give a new vitality and enlarge 
the horizon of intellectual life. Whence comes this 
man with his new poetry, which confounds the critics ? 
And that man with his subtle wit, borrowed from no 
school ? I pray you note that for many a day his car- 
pet hath been the spicula of pine, and his atmosphere 
hath been perfumed by the fir tree. He has seen the 
mountain clad in beatific raiment of white, and their 
"sacristy set round with stars." He will never go so 
far that he will not come back to sing and talk of these 
his earliest and divinest loves. So Harte comes back 



CALIFORNIANA. 



389 



again to his miner's camp and to the larger liberty of 
the mountains. And there fell on Starr King a grander 
inspiration after he had seen the white banners of the 
snow-storm floating from the battlements of Yosemite. 

— W. C. Bartlett. 




X. 



MISCELLANY, 



PART X. 



MISCELLANY. 



THE ATLANTIC CABLE (A. D. 1858). 

302. Thought has bridged die Adantic, and 
cleaves its unfettered way across the deep, winged by 
the hghtning and guarded by the billow. Though 
remote from the shores that first witnessed the deed, 
we feel the impulse and swell the paean. As in the 
frame of man the nervous sensibility is greater at the 
extremity of the body, so we, distant dwellers on the Pa- 
cific feel yet more keenly than the communities which 
form the centers of civilization, the greatness of the 
present success and the splendor of the advancing 
future. . 

From the dark, unfathomed caves of ocean the pearl 

that heaves, upon the breast of beauty is dragged to 

the glare of day. The unburied dead lie waiting for 

the resurrection morning, while above them the winds 

wail their perpetual requiem; there the lost treasures 
27 



592 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

of India and Peru are forever buried; there the wrecks 
of the Armada and Trafalgar are forever whelmed. 
But amid these scattered relics of the buried past, over 
shell-formed shores and wave-worn crags, the gleaming 
Thought darts its way ; amid the monsters of the deep, 
amid the sporting myriads and countless armies of the 
sea, the single link that unites two worlds, conveys the 
mandate of a king or the message of a lover. Of old, 
the Greek loved to believe that Neptune ruled the 
ocean and stretched his trident over the remotest 
surge. The fiction has become reality; but man has 
become the monarch of the wave, and his trident is a 
single wire! All creeds, all races, all languages are 
here; every vocation of civilized life mingles in the 
shout and welcomes the deed. The minister of religion 
sees the Bow of Promise reflected under the sea, which 
speaks of universal peace; the statesman perceives 
another lengthening avenue for the march of free prin- 
ciples; the magistrate can see here new guards to the 
rights of society and property, and a "wide field for the 
spread of international law; the poet kindles at the 
dream of a great republic of letters tending toward a 
universal language; and the seer of science finds a 
pledge that individual enterprise may yet embody his 
discoveries in beneficent and world-wide action. 

The spectacle which marked the moment when the 
cable was first dropped in the deep sea was one of ab- 
sorbing interest. Two stately ships of different and 
once hostile nations, bore the precious freight. Meet- 
ing in mid-ocean, they exchanged the courtesies of their 
gallant profession — each bore the flag of St. George, 



MISCELLANY. 393 

each carried the flaming stripes and blazing stars — on 
each deck that martial band bowed reverently in prayer 
to the Great Ruler of the tempest; exact in order, per- 
fect in discipline, they waited the auspicious moment to 
seek the distant shore. Well were those noble vessels 
named — the one, Niagara, with a force resistless as our 
own cataract, the other, Agamemnofi, "King of Men," 
as constant in purpose, as resolute in trial, as the great 
leader of the Trojan war. Right well, oh, gallant crew, 
have you fulfilled your trust! Favoring were the gales 
and smooth the seas that bore you to the land! And 
if the wishes and prayers of the good and wise of all 
the earth may avail, your high and peaceful mission 
shall remain forever perfect, and those triumphant 
standards, so long shadowing the earth with their glory, 
shall wave in united folds as long as the Homeric story 
shall be remembered among men, or the thunders of 
Niagara reverberate above its arch of spray. 

— Gen. E. D. Baker. 

303. A REFLECTION, peculiarly beautiful and ap- 
propriate, is suggested by the first dispatch transmitted 
from Europe to America: "Glory to God in the high- 
est, and on earth peace, good will to men." This salu- 
tation fell from angelic lips, addressed to the simple 
shepherds of Judea, as they watched their flocks upon 
the star-lit plains of Bethlehem, two thousand years 
ago. It breathed the spirit of thanksgiving, of peace 
and kindness. Since that period the world has under- 
gone strange mutations. The star of empire has steadily 
held its course westward: commerce has changed its 

O 



394 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

seat; Palestine lives only in history; and Jerusalem, 
the pride of the East, has long since fallen from her 
high estate. The torch of war lit up her temple and 
her streets, and her gates yielded to the Saracen, 
Rome, the then mistress of the world, at whose shrine 
the learned and great of earth paid submissive homage, 
is now but a spectral shadow of her former self Her 
orators are silent, her generals slain, her legions scat- 
tered, her sceptre broken. Britain was then a rude, 
barbarous island, scarcely regarded or known. Learn- 
ing and religion had not blessed or instructed her, nor 
the light of science dawned upon her. To-day she is 
a great nation, occupying a place in the front rank of 
wealth and civilization, powertul on the land and supreme 
on the sea. America was then unknown to civilized 
men. The foot of the Caucasian had never pressed 
her soil, nor had her peaceful bosom been disturbed by 
the shock of barbarous war or political strife. She was 
just as God had made her — silent, beautiful, grand. 
Nineteen centuries have passed away, and more than 
fifty generations of men have gone down to their 
graves. The Church has endured bitter persecutions; 
Science has bled beneath the heel of military oppres- 
sion; the lamps of learning have often been well-nigh 
extinguished; splendid libraries have been consumed; 
and yet the heaven-born salutation song to the Judean 
shepherds is still preserved. The lightnings of heaven 
catch the strain, and through the deep, resounding sea, 
along the watery thoroughfare of thought, beyond the 
explorations of curious man, amidst coral, rock, and 
drifting sands, among the graves of lost mariners, shut 



MISCELLANY. 305 

out from the light of day, the gaze of stars and the din 
of men, these words of peace are conveyed to expectant 
miUions. How beautiful! how auspicious! how replete 
with signs and promises of peace! — E. D. Wheeler. 



MATERIALISM. 

304. Materialism is no new theory; materialists 
have disturbed the peace in the harmony of truth from 
time almost beyond record ; but especially does the 
world remember the name of Spinoza; and his doctrine 
called Spinozism is little other than the materialism of 
to-day. The creative power, God, the Almighty, was 
not absolutely denied by Spinoza; but as in his doctrine 
of chances a geometrical forethought antecedent to the 
formation of an organism was impossible, God was only 
an early form of matter. 

Spinoza, born in 1632, in Holland, was a learned 
Jew; but, for his heresies, was expelled from the He- 
brew Church. In a spirit of charity and honor to his 
erudition, he was accepted into the Christian Church. 
Herein he proved equally obnoxious, and was summa- 
rily dismissed, or excommunicated. Nothing daunted, 
he published his reticent controversies, only to see 
them suppressed or burnt. But he worked an influence 
upon his age; bribery could not tempt him; menace he 
did not dread; and his influence will endure forever. 
Nor is he the first, nor the last learned man whose 
mind has failed to be inspired with the transcendent 



396 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

beauties of divine creation, or his moral emotions mel- 
lowed with the poetry and the harmonies of Nature. 

Since the appearance of man on earth many of the 
great epochs of life, involving thousands of centuries, 
have transpired; but it is not so very many years since 
man discovered and reduced to order the simplest laws 
and conditions of physics; the first mechanical data of 
the principles which govern force and motion ; the 
scientific combinations of architecture; the minute de- 
tails of house carpentry ; the incessant and so often 
ruinous influence of gravitation, on whose nice adjust- 
ments man's equilibrium, both in full action and repose, 
depends; the great demonstrations of geometry, with 
all their applications in the great areas of astronomy — 
all, all, are but recent, in comparison with the evolu- 
tions of organized beings, with man, their highest type 
on earth; and yet the work of every vitalized organism 
demonstrates that the antecedent conception by a su- 
perior intelligence was indispensable to their existence; 
and in their exquisite symmetries are proved the pre- 
knowledge of all the great physical laws. 

The human body, in general terms, consists of a 
solid head, a movable trunk, supported by a flexible 
column and four limbs. These several members are 
united by joints or hinge-work. It represents a conical 
form, inverted with its apex, or, one might say, its two 
apices, resting on the ground without any further 
attachment than the soles of the feet and the attraction 
of gravity. Viewed as a mechanism, you perceive that 
this construction is very unfavorable for stability in its 
upright position, and would be very easily overturned. 



MISCELLANY. 397 

Indeed, if una»ided by a constant mutation of muscular 
forces kept in play by voluntary efforts, it could only 
maintain its upright position for a very short time. 
Through the centre of this cone a vertical line repre- 
sents the line of gravitation. Now it is only by care- 
ful obedience, learned by long experience, to the laws 
of gravity, that this erect position can be continued; 
the various departures from and returns to which con- 
stitute all the movements — as walking, leaping, dancing, 
the art of equitation — which the body assumes. So 
thoroughly do all these motions become ediicated by the 
action of thought and will on the muscles and joints, 
that their voluntary motions come finally to appear 
involuntary; but in truth they are never so. So rapidly 
is the telegraphy of the brain conducted that we fail 
to register its time. As an illustration of its perfect 
ability, all the grace and rapid performance of a Fanny 
Elssler is but the music of the mind transmitted to and 
enacted by the feet, every quaver and semi-quaver of 
the one being converted into motion by the other. 

This, then, is the converse of the mind with the 
great system of muscles it controls; and its perfection 
depends upon the trained application of the laws of 
gravitation and mechanism through the 'centre of the 
body, and the possible departures from it. See the 
exterior semblance of this grand mechanical combina- 
tion, [pointing to a human statue divested of the skin] 
and yet how coarse and rude it all appears if compared 
with those unseen constructions of the eye, the ear, 
and the vocal apparatus. Is this mere chance.-* or is it 
the workmanship of a God? 



398 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Religion, assume what cast it may be, is only the 
tender poetic child of devotion, and devotion is that 
holy differentiation between godlike man and apelike 
animal ; that impassioned sentiment, inwrought of a 
jealous Deity, whose love for His last and best creation, 
with the mother's for her feeble, willful infant, fearing 
and pre-knowing ingratitude, engrafted this profoundest 
of all emotions in its inmost nature, to secure its fidelity. 
This is the differentiation which Mr. Darwin, in con- 
structing his chain of many links, has ignored or for- 
gotten ; but an all-wise Creator so planted it in every 
human bosom from creation's dawn, that it is as indis- 
pensable as life to existence — all nations feel it, all 
nations adore and worship. Riot over it as they may, 
the Creator ever attains His loving object; to their 
knees all races bend in trembling adoration at His 
shrine. — Dr. A. B. Stout, 



THE SCIENCE OF MEDICINE. 
S05. The Science of Medicine in this age of 
the world is endowed with marvelous vitality and pro- 
gress, it draws richest nourishment from all parts of the 
earth; and, fed at the hands of thousands of loving and 
earnest devotees, its growth and development are ob- 
jects of immeasurable splendor. It leaps and bounds 
along the plane of the century — swift and bright as the 
sweep of a comet, exploding the errors of the past — 
dissipating present obscurities and illuminating the 
the future; untired by time, endowed with exhaustless 
energies, it knows no halting place save the last station 



MISCELLANY. 399 

at which the finite must stop and the infinite begin. 
In the contemplation of this truth may be perceived 
the necessity for unceasing labor and study on the part 
of Professors and Students; on the part of all, in fact, 
who would keep pace with the progress and improve- 
ment of our science, or rise to distinction among the 
savans of the century. 

If the ''ultima thule' of our science were reached; 
if it were finished in all its fair proportions; the degree 
of labor necessary to attain this station of knowledge, 
language is indequate to describe; and once attained, 
the infirmities of memory are so great, that it must 
needs be constantly refreshed by study, or the accumu- 
lated learning of the past would insensibly disappear 
and finally be lost to the world forever. 

In the prosecution then of the study of all unfinished 
sciences, the relations between the teacher and the 
taught, between professor and student, are not and can 
not be severely drawn; they stand more on equal foot- 
ing, something like older and younger brothers, the 
former guiding, scarcely instructing the latter, for the 
way after a while is full of difficulty and obscurity to 
all, and under such circumstances every one is a stu- 
dent. No longer, then, are there professors and pupils; 
ignorance levels all such distinctions and there is in 
reality no difference between them, 

A community of labor, an identity of interest and 
equality of position, should draw us very closely to- 
gether, making of us a confraternity devoted to science 
and to each other, finding- in each other sufficient reason 
for attachment, at least in this, that we have voluntarily 



400 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and con ainore given ourselves to a science which, un- 
less we are altogether abandoned, must elevate the soul 
and chasten the heart, teaching us reverence for Him 
who has done all things wisely and well; teaching us 
charity for all men, sympathy for their misfortunes, 
patience for their transgressions; teaching us our own 
weakness and littleness, and the awful majesty of Om- 
nipotence, making of us all better and wiser men, prac- 
tical philanthropists, working to practical ends and aims, 
whose grand objective is the relief of all the ills that 
flesh is heir to, all the mental and physical infirmities 
of mankind. 

It is in medicine, and in medicine alone, that benevo- 
lence finds a field for its fullest scope, wondrous fore- 
sight, exhaustless energies and most signal triumphs. 
Benevolence that leans not upon medicine nor invokes 
her aid in the consummation of its mission is indeed a 
most impotent virtue. 

On the face of all nature are impressed, sometimes 
indistinctly, sometimes in frightful perspicuity, the char- 
acters of sufferinsf, disease and death. Take from the 
mead, where an emerald waving sea of luxuriant fresh- 
ness proclaims the perfection of life, a single blade of 
grass and examine carefully the structure. A minute 
perforation in one portion tells the story that a destruc- 
tive worm has been there; in another portion a blight 
or mould announces that some mysterious chemical ac- 
tion or physical vicissitude has commenced a series of 
processes whose climax is death. The leaf that Hutters 
from the tree and falls at your feet in your rambles 
through the forest, is a sermon in miniature on the de- 



MISCELLANY. 401 

cay and death which fasten themselves inevitably on 
all organized bodies. Death is indeed one of the con- 
ditions of life. Wherever we see life, no matter in how 
humble or exalted way it manifests its presence, death 
is the inseparable associate of its continuance. In the 
disintegration of the blood, for instance, may be per- 
ceived an illustration of this truth. The red corpuscles, 
in giving to life the nourishment necessary for the per- 
fection of its operations, are weakened and ultimately 
destroyed, and their inanimate remains helplessly sur- 
render themselves to certain chemical actions, assume 
new relations in the system, or through the various 
emunctories finally find an exit from the body. The 
moment that digestion fails to replace with new cor- 
puscular elements those which life has used, and in 
using destroyed, then death, universal death, ensues. 

Running up the scale of creation, commencing at 
the point where the senses almost fail to demonstrate 
the existence of life, and ending in the sublimest forms 
of physical and intellectual powers, the same general 
law obtains, the germs of disease and death are there, 
they may remain for a time undeveloped, some inter- 
current trouble may anticipate the unavoidable casualty; 
care may retard for a season the evolution of these 
germs, but sooner or later they pronounce themselves 
and then the instinct of self-preservation calls aloud for 
help. 

What was true in reference to the blade of grass or 
the falling leaf, is equally true in reference to man, to 
whom all sublunary things are subordinate: for whose 
use and comfort they were indeed created. There is 



402 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

no spot, there is no clime throughout God's universe 
wherein are found the habitations of man which are not 
darkened by distem.per and desolated by death. The 
wail that in remote antiquity rent the startled atmos- 
phere, when bloody assassination, done by a brother's 
hand, spilt the first blood, destroyed for the first time a 
human life, has been sounding through the centuries 
ever since, and the dismal melancholy diapason will be 
hushed only on the consummation of the planet on 
which we live. Early and late, at midnight and at noon, 
from the four winds of heaven, from city, hamlet and 
plain, from the palaces of the rich and great, and from 
the hovel of the Vv^retched and the poor, comes that 
never-ceasing cry of agony, moaning over the sick, 
wailing over the dying, and shrieking over the dead. 
In the presence, then, of such dreadful truths, whose 
universality is so perfectly established, and reflecting 
that medicine is the only power that can cope with 
nature's infirmities as manifested in the human family, 
who is mad or impious enough to doubt that benevolence 
finds in medicine a field for its most comprehensive 
scope. Working in harmony, medicine and benevo- 
lence present a combination whose triumphs are in the 
strictest sense miraculous, approaching in majesty and 
splendor the wonders wrought by Him, in whose pres- 
ence the conscious water saw its God and blushed! 

— Dr. J. Campbell Sharb. 

THE LAW, BENCH AND BAR. 

806. The province of the law is as wide and com- 
prehensive as the requirements — natural and artificial — 



MISCELLANY. 403 

of human society. Wherever a political organization has 
existed, its elements have been combined and held to- 
gether by law. Indeed, without law, such an organi- 
zation could not exist — it is its vivifying and sustain- 
ing spirit. The completeness, justice and efficiency 
of a nation's laws constitute perhaps the one infallible 
test of its true advance along the line of civilization; 
for, as has been shown by Savigny, the progress of 
legislation is not governed by chance, but is the ex- 
pression of the very life of a people. The primary, 
fundamental conceptions which distinguish the juris- 
prudence of one people, of one age, from another, 
illustrate most clearly the habits of thought and action, 
the beliefs and sentiments of the respective times and 
peoples. They indicate the character of the prevailing 
industries — the relation of the governors to the gov- 
erned — of nation to nation. Material progress and 
mental and moral advance — man's view of his duty 
to his fellow man and his relation to the unseen 
world — may be read in the juridicial records of human 
government, even as the geologist sees in the various 
strata of the earth the history of its formation. And 
as the history of man transcends in interest and im- 
portance the history of the globe which he inhabits, it 
would seem that the studies, contemplations and re- 
flections of the juristic explorer must necessarily lead 
to results surpassing in grandeur and usefulness the mi- 
nute and laborious observation and profound generali- 
zations of the physical discoverer. The sphere of the 
latter has fixed limits — that of the former has no 
boundaries but those beyond which the mental and 



404 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

moral capacities of the race cannot go. These rules, 
by which the conduct of man as a social being is gov- 
erned — by many not always consciously felt, and recog- 
nized dimly, if at all — are yet as universal and potent 
in their domain as those natural forces which guide the 
courses of the planets, and shape the perfect sphere of 
the dew-drop on the rose. 

In the practical application of these rules to the mani- 
fold phases of human intercourse — in the enforcement 
of obligations upon which the protection of life, liberty 
and property depends — appropriate instrumentalities are 
demanded. These are what we term the Bench and 
Bar. In one view, their functions are clearly distin- 
guishable, but practically the one is essential to the 
other. Whether the old conception of each judicial deci- 
sion being a direct and special emanation from the Deity, 
or the other view that judicial duty consists in merely 
applying a well-known rule to a given state of facts, pre- 
vail, the necessity for a class which shall present prop- 
erly each dispute for determination must be generally 
recognized. "The advocate," says the great French 
Chancellor, "is placed for the public good, between the 
tumult of human passions and the throne of justice, to 
offer the prayers of the people, and to bear back the 
response of the law." The responsibility devolving 
upon the lawyer is, and necessarily must be, of 
the most weighty, important, and at times awful 
nature. Life, liberty, property, character are entrusted 
to his keeping. To his honor, be it said, that weighed 
in the balance, he has rarely been found wanting. The 
history of English and American liberty is resplendent 



MISCELLANY. 405 

with the names of lawyers who have battled as bravely 
and successfully in the forum for that sacred cause, as 
any plumed knight or mailed baron in field or fortress. 
Whether in the humbler walks of the profession or 
along its mountain tops, the labors of the lawyer are 
always useful and sometimes indispensable. He, at 
least, should be "faithful among the faithless." Whether 
his office' be that of priest or acolyte in the sacred tem- 
ple of Justice, he must hefaiihfiil — faithful to his client, 
to society, to himself. To his consciousness should 
ever be present that most impressive injunction: 

"To thine own self be true, 
And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to an}- man," 

— Henry H. Reid. 

307. The lives of Coke, Plowden, Mansfield, 
Kenyon, Marshall, Story, and a host of others, honest, 
sincere, learned and resolute men, have been spent in 
the examination of laws, in studying them profoundly, 
with reference to the eternal fitness of things, and the 
wants of a civilized community. It is no easy thing 
to frame a system of laws which shall provide for every 
one of the strangely complicated combinations of so- 
ciety; such a system must be the growth of ages, the 
fruit of long reflection and still longer experience; and 
when it is finished and complete, the breath of lawless- 
ness and irreverence can destroy in a single day what 
centuries of disinterested, intelligent, reverent work 
have reared. I never go into Court and hear the judge 
render his decision in a civil case where large property 



40G CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

interests are settled, or speak the sentence by which a 
human being is adjudged unworthy to live, without a 
feelino- that somethinof more than the utterance of a 
human being is issuing from his lips. I recognize in 
the Judge, as he performs his solemn task, a being, 
clothed for the moment, with the attributes of Divinity 
itself; the humble court-room swells into the dimen- 
sions of a grand temple of justice, where the vice- 
gerent of God presides. 

Whatever view partisans may take of the trial of 
President Johnson,, at Washington, all will be agreed 
on one point, and that is that the possibility of such a 
trial, the trial of the Chief Magistrate of the nation, of 
the Grand Commander of our armies and High Admiral 
of our navy, before a court of Representatives ot the 
people, that trial taking place at a time when the angry 
feelings of war had hardly commenced to abate, is the 
best illustration of the wisdom, and the surest guaranty 
of the permanence of the institutions of the United 
States. No such trial could be possible except under 
a government of the people. Brutus killed his best 
friend for the love of Rome, and the hope of the Re- 
public rested on the dagger of the assassin. The spirit 
of English liberty, brutally repressed by the tyranny of 
Henry the Eighth, stayed in its progress by the genius 
and womanhood of Elizabeth, fretting and chafing 
under the pedantic claim of James the First to rule by 
divine right, at length wields the ax, and as it falls on 
the neck of Charles the First, the martyred king, the 
great poet of republics, and of the rights of man — the 
gentle Milton — stands applauding, proclaiming that a 



MISCELLANY. 407 

deed, great, good, and essential to England's progress, 
has been performed. There was no other means by 
which liberty could assert herself. "Son of Saint Louis, 
ascend to Heaven!" cries the priest, and the innocent, 
harmless Louis the Sixteenth mounts the scaffold, a 
necessary victim, when it is a question of changing a 
dynasty, which rests on force. 

"Andrew Johnson, come into Court!" shouts the 
crier, and humbly pleading that he is not guilty; that 
counsel, learned in the law, will prove to his judges that 
he ought not to vacate his place of monarch; the elected 
of thirty millions of freemen, submits himself to the law 
and asks its decision whether he shall reio;n or not. 
Has the world ever seen a greater triumph of law? 

— John B. Felt on. 

808. Science is a collection of truths; an art 
is a collection of rules for conduct. The end of science 
is truth; the end of art is work. Since science is con- 
versant about speculative knowledge only, and art is 
the application of knowledge to practice, jurisprudence, 
when applied to practice, is an art, whether in enacting 
laws as in legislation, or in the actual working of the 
law as in advocacy; but jurisprudence, when confined 
to the theory of law, is strictly a science. Law as an 
art aims at the practical object of improving the con- 
dition of men in their social conditions; it has reference 
to conduct; by which we mean all that directly involves 
the relation of men to one another. When this is 
done, law, as an art, is satisfied. But then arise further 
questions. Why is one law better than another? What 

28 



408 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

as the ultimate nature of law? Whence does law 
arise? It is the science which deals with such questions, 
and when it has ascertained this, it is satisfied. It is 
true that the science assists the art, but that is not so 
much the object of the science. The science arises 
from human inquisitiveness, proceeding in the same 
spirit of inquiry which leads men to search the rocks 
and caves in the bowels of the earth, examine its strata, 
and thus form the science of geology. 

The true aim and object of all human enactments, 
the real art of legislation, should be to define and es- 
tablish the relative rights of men; it should not, it cannot 
interfere with their absolute natural rights. It is in this 
respect that law has had its chief imperfections, and 
where it needs most to be guided by science; and the 
aid of science will enable us, by a study of men in their 
social relations, to discover principles on which laws 
may be based, directing and controlling their conduct. 
By a study of Sociology and Political Economy we 
have attained to a knowledge of certain principles which 
we know to be uniform, steady and constant in their 
operation, wherever there is any social organization; 
and in so far as positive law is based on a recognition 
of these principles, it may be claimed to be scientific. 

—JoJm Proffait, LL. B. 

309. The Constitution of the United States 
guards with jealous care the liberty of the citizen. It 
provides that he shall be free from arrest, except upon 
warrant issued upon probable cause, supported by oath 
or affirmation. But the Constitution was established 



MISCELLANY. 409 

not only for times of peace; not only for times when a 
ready obedience to the laws is yielded by citizens, but 
also for times of rebellion, of war, and invasion; and it 
contains within itself all the power requisite for the 
maintenance of the Government against both foreign 
and domestic foes. The Government must exist, or 
the citizen cannot enjoy the liberty which the Constitu- 
tion intends to secure. And that the Government may 
exist, the liberty of the individual must sometimes yield 
to the demands of public safety. The very clause of 
the Constitution which declares that the privilege of the 
writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, makes 
the exception, " unless when, in cases of rebellion or 
invasion, the public safety may require it." — Jttdge 
Stephen J. Field. 

310. A Judge is expected to have the feelings and 
sympathy of a man; yet, in his decisions he should 
pronounce the law irrespective of circumstances, and 
let its majesty hush all other considerations. The prin- 
ciple is a plain one, but its practice in some cases is 
exceedingly difficult. We are liable to be influenced 
by surrounding circumstances in spite of ourselves, 
and in many cases unconsciously to ourselves. A 
consciousness of the difficulty, instead of enabling us 
to avoid it, frequently unsettles the mind, destroys the 
judgment, and causes us to rush upon the rock we 
would fain avoid. A sense of injustice that may be 
done, presses itself with force upon the mind and 
jostles it from its propriety. A feeling of this weak- 
ness causes it like the pendulum to oscillate perchance 



410 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

to the Other side of truth, in its effort to assert the 
majesty of the law. Thus, in attempting to sail be- ■ 
tween Scylla and Chary bdis, a Judge is in danger of 
touching both. — Judge D. O. Shattiick. 

311. In times of great pubHc excitement, opinions 
of men on given subjects of duty, often change from 
one extreme to another; but, for all that, something is 
necessarily due in every country to the views of life 
and duty as they may prevail amongst men. Such 
opinions are presumed to be based upon what is be- 
lieved, for the time, to correctly admeasure the duties 
of men, and to square their conduct with such duties. 
Often mistaken as public opinion is, time and the various 
events which supervene in the course of human con- 
duct, furnish a corrective for such errors, and enable 
wrongs to be redressed not with too great suddenness, 
but rather with such deliberation and healthy progress 
as that great harm may not arise from roo rapid 
changes of public sentiment. — Jtidge, O. C. Pratt. 

312. The most distinguished lawyers earned their 
proudest laurels in the battles in which they were 
obliged, in behalf of the liberties of the people, to war 
against the oppressions and tyranny of the Courts. 
The legal profession is also of all others fearless of 
public opinion. It is of all others candid and sympa- 
thetic. It has ever stood up against the tyranny of 
monarchs, on the one hand, and the tyranny of public 
opinion, on the other. And if as the humblest among 
them it becomes me to instance myself, I may say with 



MISCELLANY. 411 

a bold heart — and I do say it with a bold heart — that 
there is not in all this world a wretch so humble, so 
guilty, so despairing, so torn with avenging furies, so 
pursued by the vengeance of the law, so hunted to cities 
of refuge, so fearful of life, so afraid of death — there is 
no wretch so deeply steeped in all the agonies of vice 
and misery and crime — that I would not have a heart 
to listen to his cry, and find a tongue to speak in his 
defence, though around his head all the fury of public 
opinion should gather and rage and roar and roll, as 
the ocean rolls around the rock. And if I ever 
forget, if I ever deny, that hignest duty of my profes- 
sion, may God palsy this arm and hush this voice for- 
ever. — Gen. E. D. Baker. 

313. The unity of laws must be in some power 
behind them. All law is will; will, that is law, is one 
as the sun; law, many as the rays. As every ray is all 
sun, so every law is all will. If a stone fall to the 
earth, it falls by the act of some will. If sap rises in 
the tree, it does so by the act of some will. If heat is 
transformed into electricity, or electricity into heat, the 
correlation is the act of some will. Every manifesta- 
tion in matter is the manifestation of supreme, unre- 
sisted will. In conduct, morality is the domination of 
superhuman will, and immorality the opposition of 
human to this superhuman will. It is therefore a law 
only unto itself, and so unto nothing, for by itself noth- 
ing is. 

We find the same method of evolution in both physi- 
cal and moral forces. If matter integrates and motion 



412 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

is dissipated, so in morals — ideas unify and agitation 
ceases. If heat is correlated into electricity, or the 
reverse, so in morals — the less of virtue, the more of 
vice. The method of correlation is as exact and inexo- 
rable in the one case as in the other. The same way 
indicates the same will. 

Therefore, what we are accustomed to call the laws 
or facts of nature, are the omnipresent, perpetual law- 
making, the continuous willing, the living law, the 
unadjourned legislature of some supernal will. Essen- 
tially, nothing is fixed. All things exist in will, and will 
may change its manifestations. Will is eternal, and 
nothing abides apart from its decisions. In its unity is 
the unity of law. All opposing will is not law, but 
lawlessness — Rev. Wm. H. Piatt. 



THE COMMON AND CIVIL LAW CON- 
TRASTED. 

314. The Common Law is that system of juris- 
prudence which, deducing its origin from the traditionary 
customs and simple laws of the Saxons, becoming 
blended with many of the customs and laws of the 
Normans, enriched with the most valuable portions 
of the Civil Law, modified and enlarged by numer- 
ous Acts of the English Parliament, smoothed in its 
asperities and moulded into shape by a succession of as 
learned and wise and sagacious intellects as the world ever 
saw, has grown up, during the lapse of centuries, under 



MISCELLANY. 413 

the reformed religion and enlightened philosophy and 
literature of England, and has come down to us, 
amended and improved by American Legislation, and 
adapted to the republican principles and energetic char- 
acter of the American people. To that system the 
world is indebted for whatever it enjoys of free govern- 
ment, of political and religious liberty, of untrammeled 
legislation, and unbought administration of justice. To 
that system do we now owe the institution of trial by 
jury, and the privileges of the writ of Habeas Corpus, 
both equally unknown in the Civil Law. Under that 
system all the great branches of human industry — ■ 
agriculture, commerce, and manufactures — enjoy equal 
protection and equal favor; and under that, less than 
under any scheme ever devised by the wisdom of man, 
has personal liberty been subject to the restrictions and 
assaults of prerogative and arbitrary power. 

The Civil Law, on the other hand, is that system 
which, based upon the crude laws of a rough, fierce 
people, whose passion was war, and whose lust, con- 
quest — received, in its progress through the various 
stages of civilization from barbarism to refinement, a 
variety of additions and alterations, from the Plebiscita 
of the Roman Plebeians, from the Senatus-consulta of 
the Roman Senate, from the decrees of Consuls and 
Tribunes, from the adjudications of praetors, from the 
responses of men learned in the law, and from the 
edicts and rescripts of the tyrants of Rome, until, in the 
early ages of Christianity, the whole chaotic mass was, 
by the order and under the patronage of the Emperor 
Justinian, systemized, reduced into form, and pro- 



414 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

mulgated for observance by the Roman people, in the 
shape of four books called the Institutes, fifty books 
known as the Pandects, and certain additional edicts, 
designated as the Novels of Justinian. Thereafter, and 
until the final downfall of the Eastern Empire of Rome, 
the Justinian code furnished the guide for legal tribu- 
nals throughout the provinces subject to the Imperial 
sway, in all cases political, civil, and criminal, except so 
far as particular decisions were commanded, annulled, 
or modified by the will of despotic power. But, as, 
century after century, wave upon wave of Northern 
barbarism poured down on the effeminacy of Southern 
Europe, sparing in its course neither the intellectual nor 
the material monuments of civilization, the administra- 
tion of Roman law was, in city after city, and province 
after province, gradually obliterated, at the same time, 
and to the same extent, that Roman power was crushed, 
and Roman institutions demolished. The whole sys- 
tem of Justinian was at length swept from the face of 
the earth, or buried in the recesses of cloisters, alike 
forgotten and unknown. In the twelfth century, how- 
ever, a copy of it was accidentally discovered at Amalfi, 
in Italy; and, owing to the arbitrary nature of some of 
its provisions, as well as to the wisdom and excellence 
of its general features, it was seized upon with avidity 
by the clergy, as favorable to their spiritual authority, 
and by monarchs, as conducive to the support of their 
despotic power. It was at once taught in the schools, 
studied in the convents, sanctioned by kings, and com- 
mended by the Holy Father himself, who held the 
keys of heaven. In a few years it became the prevail- 



MISCELLANY. 415 

ing system of laws throughout most of that portion 
of Europe, in which the founder of Christianity was 
respected, and the saints and martyrs adored. Thus, 
as in earher times, the fine arts, Hterature, philosophy, 
and graceful superstitions of Greece, had captivated 
the rude minds and softened the stern natures of the 
Roman people; so, centuries afterwards, the refined 
system of Roman jurisprudence overthrew the uncouth 
customs and ill-digested laws of it conquerors, and led 
captive kings and nobles, clergy and laity, in the pro- 
gress of its triumphal procession.' With the exception 
of England alone, the code of Justinian became en- 
grafted upon the local institutions of each separate prin- 
cipality and kingdom, and constituted a general system 
of European law; but, neither the favor of kings, the 
denunciations of priests, nor even the fulminations 
from the Papal See itself, could induce the English 
barons, or the English Courts, or the English people, 
to receive it as a substitute for their own favorite and 
immemorial customs. At this early period, then, when 
the dawn of a new civilization was just beginning to 
burst upon the world, the kingdoms of Europe, though 
united in religious institutions, were divided in reverence 
for laws. That division has continued to the present 
day; and has also extended over the islands and conti- 
nents, not then known, but since discovered' and occu- 
pied. Wherever the English flag has been unfurled 
upon a savage or hostile shore, possession has been 
taken in the name of its sovereign, and in behalf of its 
laws; and upon whatever coast an English colony has 
been planted, there also have the colonists established 



41 G CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

the Common Law, and have ever afterwards clung to it 
as the birthright of themselves and their children, with a 
tenacity that no power, no suffering, no fear of danger, 
no hope of reward, could induce them to relax. In the 
same way has the Roman or Civil Law gone hand in 
hand with the extended dominion of the continental 
nations of Europe. Thus it happens that, at the pres- 
ent time, the whole christianized world is ruled by one 
system or the other. England, her colonies in all parts 
of the globe, and the United States, with the exception 
of Louisiana, adhere to the Common Law; whilst, ex- 
cepting Russia and Turkey, the nations on the continent 
of Europe, Mexico, Guatamala, all the republics of 
South America, together with the Empire of Brazil, 
maintain the supremacy of the Civil Law, with certain 
restrictions, limitations and additions, necessary to adapt 
it to the peculiar organization of each particular State. 
It would be a curious, if not an instructive subject of 
inquiry, were it possible to arrive at a satisfactory con- 
clusion, to ascertain how far the intellectual and moral 
condition of the people of those countries in which the 
Civil Law prevails, has been produced by their legal 
system, and what influence the free principles and exact 
justice of the Common Law have exercised in develop- 
ing the sturdy, sagacious, and self-relying spirit of the 
English and American people. To whatever cause it 
may be owing, it is nevertheless true, that with a few rare 
exceptions on either side, there is a strongly marked 
boundary between the domains of the respective sys- 
tems. In the one, you perceiv^e the activity, the throng, 
the tumult of business life — in the other, the staofiiation 



. MISCELLANY. 417 

of an inconsiderable and waning trade; in the one, the 
boldness, the impetuosity, the invention of advancing 
knowledge and civilization — in the other, feebleness of 
intellect, timidity of spirit, and the subserviency of 
slaves; in the one, the strength and freshness of man- 
hood — in the other, the weakness of incipient decay. 
The one possesses a progressive and reforming nature 
— the other partakes of quietude and repose; the one 
is the genius of the present and the future — the other, 
the spirit of the past; the one is full of energetic and 
vigorous life — the other, replete with the memories of 
a by-gone and antiquated order of things. — Judge 
Natfianiel Bemiett. 



NATURE. 

315. Every mountain upholds and supports the 
herbage on its slopes, and sends down rills to carry off 
soil to the vales and plains, while they feed herbage 
there. You cannot find a tree, or plant or flower, that 
lives for itself. The animal world breathes out gases 
for the vegetable kingdom, and then the vegetable 
world exhales or stores up some elements essential to 
animal health and vigor. The carbonic acid we breathe 
out here, and which is poison to us, blown eastward by 
our west winds, may be greedily taken up a few days 
hence, by vineyards on the slopes of the Sierra, and be 
returned to us in the sweetness of the grape. The 
equator sends greeting to the arctic zone by the warm 
gulf stream that flows near the polar coasts to soften 



418 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

their winds. The poles return a colder stream, and add 
an embassy of icebergs, too, to temper the fierce heats. 
Selfishness is condemned by the still harmonies of the 
creation. Perfect order issues out of interwoven ser- 
vice. — Thos. Starr Kijig. 

316. Recognizing the fact that his body is formed 
and composed of the same elements as the air, the 
o;rass, and the insensate stone, and havinsf run its 
course, shall return to its original elements, man has 
always struggled in his beliefs, to connect his soul in its 
origin, nature, office, and end, with the universe it inhabits. 
Without arts or civilization, men made themselves a 
part of the universe. The glory of the heavens was 
theirs, with all their newness. Without knowledge they 
wandered entranced in peace, and wondered at the 
new creation. They saw they were subjected to the 
control of invisible forces, and their emotions became 
so strongly excited as to demand the deification of all 
those unseen powers, in forms which their own imagi- 
nations and passions suggested. Such was the origin 
of those forms of religious belief, which cominsr from 
the East, the birth place of man, still survive in the 
creeds of to-day. Nor does the soul manifest less 
eagerness in communion with nature now than in earlier 
times. Soiled with sin, we seek the forests and the 
mountains, and are made better by their influence. 
Cast to the earth by our enemy, mortified by our weak- 
ness and mistakes, we but touch the earth, and like 
Anteus, the earth-born, we rebound stronger than 
before. And if tired at last with contests that never 



MISCELLANY. A^9 

end, with efforts that seem fruitless for good, we retire 
to country homes, where nature dehghts us with all her 
sights and sounds, sweet is the odor of new-mown hay, 
the breath of cows, fair the broad brows of our oxen 
that never deceived us. Jocund is the song of birds, 
pleasant the rustling of leaves, the babble of waters; 
and if the thought obtrudes that the turf on which we 
lie is finally to cover us, we are glad to believe that 
while of the form that is ours there shall not remain 
one vestige, there shall still survive in grass and tree 
and flower, in forms of use and of supernal elegance 
and beauty, all that once was the habitation of an 
immortal soul. — y. McM: Shaftei". 

317. It is the glory of Nature that her laws dip 
into every part of the universe, making the oscillating 
planets keep time, the varying temperatures play into 
zones, and holding man as well as the planet and the 
pebble, and every state and empire as well as every 
man, in the coil of her great plan. The prophets long 
ago saw this, but now science with cooler breath begins 
to preach it. — Thos. Starr King. 

3ia— 

The parables of Nature run 
From the glow-worm to the sun; 
There is no land, there is no speech 
Nor lanofuaofe, but her voices teach 
Therein a truth to every one; 
And multitudinous tongues confess 
The ma;rvel of her fruitfulness. 

— Chas. Warren Stoddard. 



420 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

DEATH. 

319. I doubt whether or not we should mourn 
for any of the dead. I am confident that there should 
be no mourning for those who render themselves up as 
sacrifices in any great, just and holy cause. It better 
becomes us to praise and dignify them. 

— Gcii. Jas. A. McDoitgall. 

32 0. Do NOT weep for me, I Jznow it's right. I 
wish I could make you feel so. I wish I could describe 
my-feelings. They are strange! I feel all the privileges 
and greatness of the future. I see a great future before 
me. It already looks grand, beautiful. I am passing 
away fast. My feelings are strange. — Dying words of 
Thos. Starr King. 

321. O, Death! How bitter are the memories of 
thee! How sudden thy coming. How uncertain thy 
time. How secret thine approaches! Sometimes thou 
knockest at the door, and sometimes thou comest in 
unannounced and unbidden. Nor does it grieve thee 
much to come at the very moment when thou canst 
most impede the vain designs of mortals. Thou keep- 
est thy watch at the sick man's door, and thou dost flit 
through chambers lighted by dim tapers. In an hour, 
yea in a moment, thou dost scatter the labors of years. 
How dreadful is thy summons! how sharp thy trial! how 
stern thy judgment! how summary thine execution! 
And when thou hast levied upon thy victim and stripped 
him of all that he clung to, thou dost compel Nature 
to execute to thee a release! How universal is thy 
dominion. The powerful cannot resist, the wise know 



MISCELLANY. 421 

not how to evade thee. Thou dost cut off the expecta- 
tions of heirs, thou dost break up the succession of 
kings. With thee there is no poverty, neither are 
there any riches with thee; for gold cannot purchase 
hfe. Thou art the sword that is never bhinted, the 
bow before whose arrows all must fall. Thou sendest 
forth the plague, and whole kingdoms lie half un- 
peopled by thy ravages. Thou Liberator of prisoners! 
Thou Emancipator of him that is in bonds! Thou 
takcst forth the precious from the vile, and the vile 
from the precious; and in this thy mouth is as the call 
of God. Thou art the inevitable visitor in every home. 
Thou fillest the world with widows and with orphans. 
Thou bringest together the beginning and the end 
of man's career with scarce an inch of time between. 
Luxury is thy helper, the wine cup is thine ally. 

Under the painted face of faded beauty thou dost 
grin and chuckle; for no counterfeit of youth can de- 
ceive thee! and there thou dost make thine approaches 
confidently and securely. 

Flattery courts thee in vain, and thou mockest at the 
pride of man. Remorseless monster! Thou art deaf 
alike to the pleading of friendship and the plaintive cry 
of love. When Art and Learning weep at the early 
grave of genius, thou standest by with folded arms, and 
leaning against thy cyprus tree thou dost smile and say, 
"The prey is mine." Thou dost breathe upon the tender 
<jrass and it is blasted. Thou drinkest the winds, thou 
poisonest the air. All things else have their increase 
and their decline; but thou O Death! art forever fixed 
and permanent in thine awful being. The plumed 



422 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

hearse is thy chariot, the coffin thy traveHng trunk, Ob- 
Hvion thine outrider; and far through visionary shades 
thou dost roam with ghosts, to view thine epitaphs and 
thy sl<:ulls. Reticent monarch ! Thou makest us to die; 
but thou dost not tell us what it is to die; nor dost thou 
permit any to bring back from thy gloomy portals the 
mighty secrets that lie beyond. Grim tyrant! Thy 
carnival is the battle-field; Diseases, Massacres, Poison, 
Famine, are thy dread ministers. The whole earth is 
thy cruising ground. All that slumber in the sea be- 
long to thee. All that lie in the innumerable graves are 
thine. 7\nd when they tell thee of a Great Deliverer 
— one who will sound a mighty trumpet in thy realms, 
take away thy keys, open thy doors and arouse thy 
sleepers — one whom thy power could not hold — one 
who burst thy bars asunder, shook off thy fetters, and 
rising from the tomb, tauntingly asked thee where was 
thy sting — one who will gather together all thy victims 
— yea every atom of dust which thou hast embezzled 
and hidden away, of all the souls which thou hast 
robbed of their tenements and scattered far and wide 
over the universe, making up for them bodies clothed 
with immortality — when they tell thee all this, thou dost 
laugh; and taking thy downward flight through space, 
thou standest at the gates of Hell and shakest thy 
keys! — Geo. Bar stow. 

322. On my return to the island of Nantucket, 
atter an eleven years' sojourn in California, as I was 
rambling among the familiar scenes, I strolled out upon 
the Mill Hills, and soon found mvself treadinsf among 



MISCELLANY. 423 

the grassy mounds of the neighboring cemetery. There 
I came upon a simple shaft bearing this inscription upon 
one of its sides: "A teacher of youth." The Hterature 
of the tombstone deserves far more of the critic's anal- 
ysis and of philosophic reflection than it has ever re- 
ceived. Each age, each nation, writes above its dead, 
not only its sorrows, but its religion, and the standard 
whether physical, intellectual or moral, by which it 
appreciates greatness. The tomb-stone is a wondrous 
tell-tale. What it tells of the dead, indeed is almost 
valueless, save to personal friends who need not its 
record. But what it tells of the living is invaluable to 
after times. Even the pompous, ill-merited epitaph, 
and the quaint, rude couplet, each bears a secret in its 
core concerning the living, and tells it to those who 
come after. The language of the tomb-stone is per- 
haps the tersest and most remarkable of all literature. 
In it is a world of meaning. In the catacombs of Rome, 
you shall read the inscription: "Atrox, O Fortuna, 
truci quae funere caudes, quid mihi tam subito Maxi- 
mus eripitur." 

In that cry of the bereaved mother: "O, relentless 
fate, who delightest in cruel death, why so early is my 
Maximus torn from me.'*" you read all Roman Heathen- 
ism, hopeless and despairing. Turn to the other side 
of the gallery and there your eye shall rest upon the 
words, "Domiti in pace. Lea fecit." But, although the 
latinity of such may shock the cultivated eye in that 
straggling, misspelt scrawl, "My Domitius in peace. Lea 
erected this," you shall yet read all Christianity with its 
hopes and consolations. Between those two epitaphs, 

29 



424 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

'which almost jostle each other in the catacombs, is the 
wide religious gulf which separates Caesar and Nero from 
St. John and St. Chrysostom. To the eye of the 
modern wayfarer, perchance, as he leans against some 
cemetery fence, a stone will present itself bearing only 
the words, "Our little Kate." How short in phrase, 
but how multiplex in suggestion. Whose little Kate? 
No matter. It is enough that t/icy know. But bound 
up in those three sweet words is the record of all her 
prattling childhood, with its merry romps and ringing 
laugh; they tell the pondering wayfarer of the staircase 
where she trod, of the chamber where she slept, of the 
days and nights of her sickness, of the alternating fears 
and hopes, of the funeral, and then afterwards of the 
playthings and the little folded dresses and the desolate 
room that break the very heart — all the sweet memories 
written out in those three short words, " Our little 
Kate." Ah! the white leaves with which the hand of 
affliction has strewn our cemeteries contain a marvel of 
thought and suggestion. — Rev. F. C. Ewer. 

323.— 

O, Death! Mysterious power! 

Thou stern apostle in whose presence dread 

My soul hath cowered like a frightened child — 

Do I behold thee now, at last, aright? 

Lo, on thy brow the stamp of majesty 

Now seems impressed; and from thy sunken eye 

There gleams perennial promise for our race, 

While inspiration burns thy hollow cheek! 



MISCELLANY. 425 

Thou art God's minister, 
And dost but execute His sovereien will. 
Thou canst not then be evil; and thou dost 
Deserve, as little as thou heedest, human hate. 
Thy mission is, to sap colossal pride, 
To turn us from our butterfly pursuits, 
To teach us what we are, and how to live 
Both here and in a world where thou art not. 

Sweet thought that strengthens Faith! — 
That harbinger of immortality, 
Of tireless and illimitable flicrht! 
Soaring with golden plumes and speaking eye 
Above the weeping willows of the heart — 
'Tis thine to point the jaded soul to God, 
And lift it up on thy triumphant wings 
Into the radiant realm of perfect Day! 

— Oscar T. Shuck, 

324. — On a pressed flower. 

A simple, little flower, 
Born of the sun and shower, 
Unfolded slowly; 

Poor blossom! but to lie 
So colorless and dry — 

Forgotten wholly. 

— G. C. Hurlbut. 

A FAREWELL TO SYRIA. 

325. It was upon a bright and sunny afternoon 
that we loaded our trunks and carpet-bags upon the 



426 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

backs of a dozen lusty Beirutan porters and followed 
them down to the custom-house of that city. The 
Archdtichess Carlotta, the same steamer in which, a 
month before, we had left Alexandria for Syria, lay 
rolling gently in the waves of St. George's Bay, only 
waiting for our little party to sail away from Cyprus. In 
half an hour we had got through with the last of Syrian 
officials, public and private, and were standing upon the 
quarter-deck of the little Austrian steamer, stancher 
and sounder, we hoped, than her unfortunate patron at 
Miramar. Bey rout had never seemed so lovely; her 
harbor so graceful, her shores so invicine, as at this, 
the moment we were to take leave of them forever. It 
seemed as if old Lebanon himself leaned over toward 
the pure waters of the bay, almost nodding his snow- 
crested head in final adieu, while the mulberry groves 
upon his venerable sides gently waved their dark green 
foliage, as if in solemn warning to us that we should 
look upon their beauties no more. It is a sad thing to 
feel that you are looking for the last time upon any 
material object. The dying man bids his attendant 
raise him up and to open the window. " Let me look out 
once more at the glorious sun, the green fields, and the 
running brook, for I shall see them no more. Now* 
lay me down and shut the window." It is done, and he 
sails away. We are all either dying men or dying 
women, or are children who have come into this beau- 
tiful world with the seed of disease which carries us 
away from the bright landscape, the beautiful bay, or 
the lofty mountain, and which is sure to shut the win- 
dow upon us, in a few brief days or years at the most. 



MISCELLANY. 427 

Farewell, Syria! Thy mountains and streams, thy 
beautiful cities and pleasant groves; the land of Abra- 
ham, of Isaac and of Jacob — the birthplace of the wor- 
ship of the living- God, where Christ lived and died for 
man-kind — a long farewell! 

A tremor passes through the bones of the Archduch- 
ess, a splashing is heard over the side, the pujre waters 
are cloven asunder at the prow, and pass away in foam 
at the stern. The huge mountain straightens up in his 
seat and sinks back into the fading horizon; the groves 
of mulberry cease waving their adieus, and retire. They 
are shutting the window. — John F. Swift. 

326. — On recrossing the rocky mountains after 

MANY years. 

Long years ago I wandered here 
In the mid-Summer of the year — 

Life's Summer too; 
A score of horsemen here we rode, 
The mountain world its glories showed, 

All fair to view. 

These scenes in glowing colors drest, 
Mirrored the life within my breast, 

Its world of hope; 
The whispering woods and fragrant breeze 
That stirred the grass in verdant seas 

On billowy slope; 

And glistening crag in sunlit sky, 
Mid snowy clouds piled mountain high, 
Were joys to me; 



42« CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

My path was o'er the praries wide, 
Or here on grander mountain-side, 
To choose, all free. 

The rose that waved in morning air. 
And spread its dewy fragrance there 

In careless bloom, 
Gave to my heart its ruddiest hue, 
O'er my glad life its colors threw 

And sweet perfume. 

Now changed the scene and changed the eyes 
That here once looked on glowing skies, 

Where Summer smiled; 
These riven trees and wind-swept plain 
Now show the Winter's dread domain, 

Its fury wild. 

The rocks rise black from storm-packed snow, 
All checked the river's pleasant flow, 

Vanished the bloom; 
These dreary wastes of frozen plain 
Reflect my bosom's life again, 

Now lonesome gloom. 

The buoyant hopes and busy life 
Have ended all in hateful strife. 

And thwarted aim. 
The world's rude contact killed the rose, 
No more its radiant color shows 

False roads to fame. 

Backward, amidst the twilio-ht sflow 
Some lingering spots yet brightly show 



MISCELLANY. 429 

On hard roads won, 
Where still some grand ^peaks mark the way- 
Touched by the light of parting day 

And memory's sun. 

But here thick clouds the mountains hide, 
The dim horizon bleak and wide 

No pathway shows, 
And rising gusts and darkening sky 
Tell of "the night that cometh" nigh. 

The brief day's close. 

— Gen. John C. FremonL 



THE COMET OF 1858. 

327. If to-night, you will look out from the glare 
of your illuminated city into the northwestern heavens, 
you will perceive, low down on the edge of the horizon, 
a bright stranger pursuing its path across the sky. 
[Atlantic Cable Oration, San Francisco, September 27, 
1858. — Editor.] Amid the starry hosts that keep their 
watch, it shines, attended by a brighter pomp and followed 
by a broader train. No living man has gazed upon its 
splendors before. No watchful votary of science has 
traced its course for nearly ten generations. It is more 
than three hundred years since its approach was visible 
from our planet. When last it came it startled an 
Emperor on his throne; and while the superstition of 
his age taught him to perceive in its presence a herald 
and a doom, his pride saw in its flaming course and 



400 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

fiery train, the announcement that his own hght was 
about to be extino^uished. In common with the lowest 
of his subjects, he read omens of destruction in the 
baleful heavens, and prepared himself for a fate which 
alike awaits the mightiest and the meanest. Thanks to 
the present condition of scientific knowledge we read 
the heavens with a far clearer perception. We see in 
the predicted return of the rushing, blazing comet 
through the sky, the march of a heavenly messenger 
along its appointed way and around its predestined 
orbit. For three hundred years he has traveled amid 
the regions of infinite space. "Lone, wandering, but 
not lost," he has left behind him shining suns, blazing 
stars, and gleaming constellations, now nearer the eter- 
nal throne, and again on the confines of the universe. 
He returns with visage radiant and benign; he returns 
with unimpeded march and unobstructed way ; he re- 
turns, the majestic, swift, electric telegraph of the 
Almighty, bearing upon his flaming front the tidings 
that throughout the universe there is still peace and 
order; that, amid the immeasurable dominions of the 
Great King, His rule is still perfect; that suns and 
stars and systems tread their endless circle and obey 
the eternal law. — Gen. E. D. Bake7'. 



THE MIST. 
328.- 

I watched the folding of a soft, white- wing 

Above the city's heart — 
I saw the mist its silent shadow fling 



MISCELLANY. . 431 

O'er thronged and busy marc — 
Softly it glided through the Golden Gate, 

And up the shining Bay — 
Calmly it lingered on the hills to wait 

The dying of the day. 
-Like the white ashes of the sunset fire 

It lay within the West, 
Then onward crept, above the lofty spire 

In nimbus-wreaths to rest. 
It spread anon — its fleecy clouds unrolled 

And floated gently down. 
And thus I saw that silent wing enfold 

The Babel-throated town. 
A spell was laid on restless strife and din, 

That bade its tumult cease — 
A veil was flung o'er squalor, woe, and sin. 

Of purity and peace; 
And dreaming hearts, so hallowed by the mist, 

So freed from grosser leaven, 
In the soft chime of vesper-bells could list 

Sweet, echoed tones of Heaven; 
Could see, enraptured, v^-hen the starlight came, 

With lustre soft and pale, 
A sacred city, crowned with "ring of flame," 

Beneath her misty veil. 

— Miss H. M. ^kidmore. 

THE NORTH WIND. 
329.— 

All night, beneath the flashing hosts of stars. 
The North poured forth the passion of its soul 



432 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

In mighty longings for the tawny South, 
Sleeping afar among her orange-blossoms. 
All night, through the deep canyon's organ-pipes, 
Swept down the grand orchestral harmonies 
Tumultuous, till the hills's rock buttresses 
Trembled in unison. 

The sun has risen. 
But still the storming sea of air beats on, 
And o'er the broad green slopes a flood of light 
Comes streaming through the heavens like wind, 
Till every leaf and twig becomes a lyre, 
And thrills with vibrant splendor. 

Down the bay 
The furrowed blue, save that 'tis starred with foam. 
Is bare and empty as the sky of clouds; 
For all the little sails, that yesterday 
Flocked past the islands, now have furled their wings,. 
And huddle frightened at the wharves — just as, 
A moment since, a flock of twittering birds 
Whirled through the almond trees like scattered leaves,. 
And hid beyond the hedge. 

How the old oaks 
Stand stiffly to it, and wrestle with the storm! 
While the tall eucalyptus' plumy tops 
Tumble and toss and stream with quivering light. 
Hark! when it lulls a moment on the ear. 
The fir-trees sing their sea-song - now again 
The roar is all about us like a flood; 
And like a flood the fierce lieht shines, and burns 
Away all distance, till the far blue ridge, 



MISCELLANY. 433 

That rims the ocean, rises close at hand, 
And high, Pronietheus-hke, great Tamalpais 
Lifts proudly his grand front, and bears his scar, 
Heaven's scathe of wrath, defiant like a god. 

I thank thee, <dorious wind! Thou brincrest me 
Something that breathes of mountain crags and pines; 
Yea, more — from the unsullied, farthest North, 
Where crashing icebergs jar like thunder-shocks, 
x^nd midnight splendors wave and fade and flame. 
Thou bring'st a keen, fierce joy. So wilt thou help 
The soul to rise in strength, as some great wave 
Leaps forth, and shouts, and lifts the ocean-foam. 
And rides exultant round the shining world. 

—E. R. Sill. 



WOMAN. 

330. William H. Seward, upon his return from 
his journey round the world, said, "There are, in all 
the East, no homes." What a commentary upon the 
state of society in the oldest lands! No homes! Be- 
cause woman is degraded and enslaved. No homes! 
Because both religions and governments studiously and 
systematically keep mothers and daughters in the dark- 
ness of ignorance. — Rev. W. E. Ijams. 

331. Many a woman who, as a belle, was a trium- 
phant success, as a wife and mother is a pitiable failure. 
Her nominal value is what she passes for on the prome- 
nade; but her intrinsic worth is measured by the beauty 



434 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

and excellence of her home-life — by what she adds to 
the wealth and glory of humanity. The mere act of 
accepting wifehood should be equivalent to the most 
solemn vows; and no wife can hope to preserve full 
empire over the heart of a true husband whose desires 
and longinijs are forever reachinsf outside the blessed 
atmosphere of home; who does not possess, in some 
measure, a character the keystone of which is that 
whereon motherhood has its foundation — self-sacrifice. 
Happy the man, whatever his ungracious fortune, who, 
amid the frettincr and distractinsf din of the wearisome 
day, is forever catching the echoes of home-harmonies, 
awaiting him just a little ahead, in the twilight. Such 
melodies are never voiced by women who forsake the 
pole-star of duty that they may chase the igiiis-fatuits 
of Pleasure.- — Sarah B. Cooper. 

332. The history of civilization, nay of Christ- 
ianity, has been marked by the removing, one after 
another, of the shackles which an early and dark, not 
to say a savage period of our race, heaped upon woman. 
And if there be a fact as certain as that when the faint 
streaks of dawn mark the East the dav is about to 
break, it is the fact that this great nation will sooner or 
later rise and lift woman to the double throne (not, in- 
deed of art and literature, for she sits there now) but 
of science, of philosophy, of oratory, of religion, and of 
politics. The subjects presented by Providence for 
man's investigation and knowledge are many-sided. 
The angle at which woman looks upon subjects is differ- 
ent from the angle at whicn they appear to the vision 



MISCELLANY. 435 

of man. For a complete knowledge, therefore, in the 
realms of science, philosophy, religion, politics, which 
man alone cannot attain to, fixed as he is by heaven at 
the masculine angle of vision, man needs, and will 
eventually demand and have the indispensable and un- 
shackled aid of woman. Woman is the purifying 
element of our social Wk.—J^ev. F. C. Ewer. 

333. More than railroads and telegraphs, more 
than the subtile connections of commerce and literature, 
woman is spinning the delicate threads that are to bind 
the English-speaking people together and blend their 
hearts in sympathy and love. Duty, not glory, is the 
corner-stone of the Anglo-Saxon creed, and from the 
homes in three continents which rest on this foundation, 
rises the arch of promise which spans alike the stormy 
and the peaceful sea, and braids into bright and uplifted 
characters the noblest hopes of mankind. And if, 
amidst the teeming civilization of the present day, when 
in a thousand organized forms, the strength of low 
ambition and unscrupulous wealth is felt, liberty and 
virtue are not to be parted; if statesmen are to rise 
above the mists and obscurities of a narrow patriotism 
or a passionate revenge to the serene hights of wisdom 
and honor; if peace is to shed over all distracted lands 
its mild light and its perfumed warmth ; if religion is to 
cleanse its ofarments of doo;matism and intolerance, and 
walk among men in the "beauty of holiness;" to the 
moulding influence of woman, more than to all other 
earthly causes, will these mighty results be due. In 
woman, in the perfection of her attributes and of her> 



436 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

power, imagination and fact are but the faithful reflec- 
tions of each other. The earnest Ruth, "-leanino;- in 
the fields of Boaz ; Mary, dropping repentant tears 
upon the Master's feet; Priscilla, exhibiting to the red 
Savages the stern beauty of a Puritan enthusiast; the 
lovelorn Evangeline, listening to the mysterious under- 
tone of the trackless ocean; the twin sisters of mercy 
in England and America, soothing pain and anguish in 
prisons and hospitals and asylums, and even on the 
tented field, awakening contrition in the heart of guilt, 
and lifting the black curtain between despair and peace 
— all these are types and illustrations of character which 
shall form the loftiest themes of poetry and song, till 
the records of time shall close. No marvel that to 
man — furrowed and hardened by the toil and the pain 
of life — -down through the weary years, floats the sweet 
music of a woman's voice, returns the dewy brightness 
of her glance, and charms away selfishness and vice. 
No marvel that the dying soldier kisses a woman's 
shadow on his pillow. No marvel that our holiest 
feelings stir as, with one mmd and one heart, we give 
our highest honors to the name of woman. — Henry E. 
Highton. 

334. There is a great amount of genuine satis- 
faction in freely acknowledging the real empire which 
woman holds over our hearts and minds, our thoughts 
and actions, our motives, hopes and ambitions, and (I 
may add, I trust, without offense) our pockets. None 
of us, I think, will deny her right to love us and be 
loved in return, (indeed we take no small delight in 



MISCELLANY. 437 

having her exercise that prerogative in our individual 
cases) — or her right to wheedle and caress us, and to 
draw as well upon our affections as upon our bank 
accounts; to be sheltered and protected by us, and yet, 
in her own insidious, charming way, to rule and govern 
us just as autocratically as she pleases, as long as she 
sways the scepter of a true woman, and does not so far 
forget herself as to become transformed into a sort of 
moral hybrid, with a perverted ambition to enter upon 
the hard, and to her, degrading duties of man's sphere 
(for which her tender and susceptible nature so entirely 
unfits her,) impatient of wearing the modest but capti- 
vating drapery, both of mind and person, that are 
native to her; for she is as misplaced in the more mas- 
culine habits and attire as would be the Capitoline 
Venus in the heavy armor of Achilles. There are 
servitudes more delightful than the wielding of power; 
and the homage we pay to the soft sway of woman, 
which finds its strength in her very weakness, is one of 
these. It is a delight to serve, when that service is, as 
we flatter ourselves, a protection. 

The great mastiff is gentle and obedient to the con- 
trol of a child, and the strongest man is easily con- 
quered and taken captive by the charming little ways 
of the weakest woman. But she must be a woman. 
Herein lies the singular power and sway of that great 
and noble sovereign, the anniversary of whose natal 
day we celebrate. [Queen Victoria — Editor.] We 
delight to honor her. We yield her spontaneous re- 
spect through the compelling power of her womanly vir- 
tues. We yield the same obedience, the same love, the 



438 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

same respect to every true woman. Our hearts turn' 
toward them for sympathy and encouragement in our 
griefs and trials, for a shared, and thereby increased joy 
in our success, for those high impulses and truer aspira- 
tions, wdiich her purer and more delicately organized 
nature can alone afford us, and which have power to 
save us, from utter submersion in the sordid cares and 
bitter struggles of every-day life. 

"O, woman! lovely woman ! nature made you 
To temper man; we had been brutes without you. 
Angels are painted fair to look like you. 
There's in you all that we believe of heaven — 
Amazing brightness, })urity and truth, 
Eternal joy, and everlasting love." 

— William Hayes^ 



33B. Delilah.— 

[On seeing Jlr. Story's beautiful Statue, the property of Mrs. Shillaber, of San Francisco.]. 

I see thy traitor face, thy dimpled arms, 

Thy downcast head and snowy bosom's charms, 

Fair false Philistine maid. 
And the cold marble seems to throb and glow 
With life's hot blood, the pulse to come and go 

Alonof each chisel'd vein. 

I hear thee say, "Come sleep upon my knees, 
My lion-hearted Nazarite — take thine ease; 

My love shall guard thee well. 
I fain would sing to thee a Sorek air, 
And comb the tangles of thy tawny hair — 

My Samson, rest thee here." 



MISCELLANY. 439 

"Thy strength a thousand men could not withstand, 
Nor Gaza's brazen gates thy God-hke hand; 

Whence cometh it, my love?" 
I see thee stoop to kiss his drowsy brow 
And bend thee low to catch his secret, now 

I see thy false, false smile. 

Call in thy people, let them shout for joy, 
For at thy feet lies all his Strength: a boy — 

A child may bind him now. 
Aye draw thy mantle— hang thy head for Shame, 
Clutch tight thy gold and bear a wanton s name, 

Fair, frail Philistine girl. 

— Charles F. Craddock. 



THE IRISH RACE. 

336. History tells us that nations are subject to 
the universal law of decay. The shores of time are 
strewed with the wrecks of empires. Not only does 
the outward structure of government disappear, but the 
living pillars of the edifice — the people — fall, never to 
rise again. Some kingdoms perish through inherent 
weakness, others from conflict with a stronger power. 
When an exception to this apparently unrelenting law 
is found; when an ancient nation presents itself which 
has never felt the breath of decay, but exhibits the 
same vitality, energy, and power that it displayed cen- 
turies ago, it is a cause of astonishment to the historian 
and of delight to him who can call such a nation his 

.30 



440 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

own. It has been said that the greatness of a country- 
may be traced in the monuments of past ages. Is it not 
wonderful to behold a race which refuses to be judged 
by its architectural wonders alone, but raising aloft its 
voice, exclaims : " Study not the inscription on my 
ruins. Behold me in the bloom of youth; the glow 
of health is on my cheek, the sparkle in my eye. I am 
not aged though my name is found among the oldest 
nations of the earth. In years gone by I ranked with 
the first; but fate robbed me of my high position, and 
abandoned me to my conquerors. Crushed under the 
heel of oppression my body was apparently dead, but 
my spirit, the spirit of nationality lived, and now lives, 
to cheer, to animate, to enrapture my children's hearts." 

What must constitute a nation ? There must be 
something that lies deeper than the mere form of 
government. This alone cannot suffice. God forbid 
that it should. No! a national soul must exist. The 
race must have a history, genius, character. 

Have the Irish genius? — that wondrous power which, 
disdaininof the limit of cold words, seeks the maq-netism 
of hearts — which, led by science, has swept along the 
silvery stars and outshone the fiery meteor in brilliancy 
— which has filled nations with an ardent desire to gaze 
6n Freedom's face and receive from her divine hands 
the charters of their liberties — which gives to art its 
inspiration, to poetry its feeling, to eloquence its fire, to 
war its dazzling radiance — which, springing from the 
head of the Omnipotent, partaking of His glory, gilds 
with its golden beams the universe and knows no limit 



MISCELLANY. 441 

but eternity. Yes! the Irish have been blessed with 
this wondrous gift. 

Whether it sparkles forth in the bright wit that all 
the people of that race possess; or it be shown in the 
achievements of the great and glorious past by its bards, 
its brehons, its warriors, or its saints ; or in modern 
times by a Burke, leading the van in statesmanship, or 
by a Sheridan, pleading the cause of an oppressed 
nation with sublime eloquence, and astonishing the 
world by his varied powers, or by a Grattan in the Sen- 
ate, or by a Curran at the bar, pouring forth in burning 
words Erin's protest against tyranny ; or by a Gold- 
smith, a Moore, a Davis, a McCarthy, touching the 
heart by their poetry and crowning their own Green 
Isle with the laurels of song; or by a Barry, a Maclise, 
a Hogan, a Foley, drawing down the fire of Heaven, 
and imparting the breath of life to the canvas, marble, 
or bronze; or by a Balfe, a Wallace, bringing back the 
clustering memories of the bards of old by their musical 
skill — the verdict of the admirino- world is and will be 
that wherever, and in whatever capacity they are found, 
the children of Erin are the children of Genius. 

The three great features of Irish character are 
religious enthusiasm, love of country, and lightness of 
heart. In the gloom of the past this trinity of qualities 
supported the heroic people through the most blood- 
curdling tyranny that the pen of history has ever re- 
corded. Confiscation robbed them of their land in the 
name of justice, penal statutes struck at their conscience 
and their liberty in the name of law; gaunt famine 
preyed upon their hearts in the guise of political econ- 



442 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

omy. All these horrors were born of British hate and 
British rule. But suffering could not deprive the Irish 
people of their noble attributes. Three hundred years of 
continued persecution have failed to shake their faith in 
the creed that Patrick rave them. That reliirion still 
remains as the record of their endurance, and the ada- 
mant of their hopes. It is more august, more inspiring, 
loftier, and more thrilling in its memories than any 
monument of antiquity, for its foundation is divine and 
its superstructure is cemented by a people's blood. 

— Francis y. Sullivan. 



337. Christmas — 
O, winds that blow 
From palmy isles, or realms of snow, 

Be still! 
O, waves that roll, 
In majesty from pole to pole, 

Be still! 
O sea, no more 
With vain complaining vex the shore; 

Be still! 
Peace, peace to winds, and vvaves and sea, 
God's peace for all eternity! 

Lo! wise men brinof 

From the rich East their offering 

To Judah's king! 
And at his feet. 
With precious gifts and odors sweet, 

Fall worshipping. 



MISCELLANY. 443 

O, stars that gleam 

From bending skies, on Jordan's stream, 

Tocjether sinij — 
Peace, peace, God's peace on land and sea, 
Good will to men eternally ! 

CJias. F. Craddock. 



GENIUS. 

338. How often do we find all the conditions of 
good writing fulfilled, yet the net result, weakness. 
The beam of sunlight has, besides the seven rays into 
which the prism untwists it, another, the actinic ray, 
the very soul of the beam, which glides unbent through 
the prism. Something more than the bare truth is' 
needed to make words impressive; there must be the 
vivifying vigor shed into them from the man behind. 
It is not enough to have truth stored in the reservoirs 
of memory, where it can be pumped out for occasion. 
It must come first-hand from the soul, or it is power- 
less. Substances, when burned, develop just so much 
heat as is latent in them — just so much as they sucked 
from the sun at their creation. So the opinions and 
sentiments of different men exert force accordinsf to 
the degree in which they have been organized into their 
natures. Is there anything more dreary than to hear 
truth chattered to us, spirted out from behind the teeth 
of persons who do not possess it? In many, truth lies 
like the candle in the boy's pumpkin-lantern on autumn 
evenings. When an idea gets into their head, they 



444 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

pumpkin-lanternize it, and make the truth, Hke them- 
selves, a bore. The secret of eloquence is to be found 
in this vitalizing power, and the same language uttered 
by men who believe and feel what they are saying, and 
by men who do not feel it, differs as a tree pictured in 
mosaic does from a tree that has grown. It was not so 
much the clearness of Webster's thoughts as the pon- 
derous substance and swing of his whole constitution 
that made his words come down like trip-hammers. 
When he said, "There is Lexington, there is Concord, 
there is Bunker Hill," it was not the simple words that 
made them memorable, but that his hearers felt there 
was a storm of feeling entangled and swept down with 
them. The trreat thincj is, not to P"et strong- thino^s 
said, but to get the man big enough to say them. The 
same sentence uttered by one man is a mere wreath of 
breath — by another, a hurricane. Notes of hand are 
as easily and as prettily written by a pauper as by a 
Croesus, but their power to draw the bullion depends 
very much on the name you get subscribed. 

— Thos. Starr Ki7i^. 

339. The supply of genius is all ordered by an 
immutable law. W^hat have all our Presidents since 
Washington done, compared with the man who first 
organized the possibility of a telegraph ? — with him 
who devised the cotton-gin ?— with him who saw in 
imagination the steamships wrestling with the Atlantic, 
and who demonstrated that his vision could be copied 
into actual steam and steel ? What a land ours would 
be if our will and our votes could as wisely and as 



MISCELLANY. 445 

surely move the right men into the right places, as 
nature provides for the succession in the hierarchy of 
science — as she orders the great thinkers to go to their 
own places, though so widely apart in the crowds of 
common men — Moses to his post when the Prince of 
leirislators was wanted, WashinQ^ton to his when so 
much patriotism and prudence and commanding ability 
were in demand ! The rule is inflexible that every 
century will produce its two or three great thinkers. 
Society is cared for by a power that will not leave civili- 
zation to be wasted, nor the rivers of our better life to 
stagnate. — Thos. Staler King. 



OVER THE HILL. 

840.— 

L 

MARGUERITE (mUsing.) 

Three times over, four-leafed clover 
Promised me a noble lover; 
Daisy-leaf and apple-seed 
With the oracle agreed; 
And the omen did not alter, 
Tested by the holy psalter. 
Will he come from East or West.'* 
Will he know and love me best, 
Though I wear a homespun gown, 
And my hands be roui^h and brown? 
Will he see that I am not 



446 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Suited to this humble lot, 
But have loveliness to grace 
Anywhere a lady's place ? 

Golden bees and butterflies 
Ranging under other skies, 
Have you seen my lover there — 
Did you know him, brave and fair? 
Said he when he came this way — 
In a year, or in a day? 
When again you sip the flowers 
Round that future home of ours, 
Tell him he will find me leal. 
Sitting by my spinning wheel. 
Watching o'er the mountain rim, 
Keeping all my love for him, 
Holding being in suspense 
Till he come to take me hence. 



H. 



MOTHER. 

Fie, child! here you are again, idle and sighing. 
And gazing away with a lackaday stare;. 
Go call back your fancies and set your wheel flying. 
For while you go dreaming, the children go bare. 

MARGUERITE. 

O, mother! if you could have done with your fretting. 
And close down your eyelids, or look far away. 
And see, — as I see myself, — stitching and netting 
With fair dames — yet somehow I fairer than they; 



MISCELLANY. 447 

Embroidering and tambouring, braiding, and quilting, 
While soft sounds and odors steal into the hall, 
And out throuorh the lattice we see the knights tiltinor 
For favor of beauty — my favor of all; 

You would know how it is my spindle stops turning, 
That my purpose fades out and my fingers grow still, 
While my eyes steal away with unspeakable yearning 
To welcome the visions from over the hill. 

MOTHER. 

From over the hill ! ay, from over and over 
The hills, since the world had a hill and a girl! 
To all of our spinning there comes a high lover, 
To most of our choosing there comes but a churl. 

MARGUERITE. 

Ah ! no churl for me, mother, though I die lonely ; 
For I was not formed for a fate like the rest; 
The omens have told me my knight, and him only, 
Shall ever be crowned as the lord of this breast. 

And why, if he never will come, should he seem to be 
Always about to come over the hill? 
Or why, if he never will come, should I dream to be 
Always so fain and so certain he will.'* 

MOTHER. 

Poor child! you are blowing a dangerous bubble; 
Your mother and wheel are your truest friends still; 



448 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

If they bring- you less joy, they will leave you less 

trouble, 
But your Knight will fetch sorrow from over the hill. 

III. 

MARGUERITE (singing to her babe.) 

Have the elves disturbed your sleep? 
Come, my baby, laugh and leap; 
Let me by the armful measure 
All the vastness of my treasure. 
If you knew your story, Pet, 
Would you clasp and love me yet? 
If I always o'er you stood, 
Bountiful of motherhood, 
Would it matter anything 
That I lacked a wedding-ring? 
O, my beautiful — my jewel! 
I was feeble, he was cruel ; 
His the baseness, mine the blame, 
Baby, baby, yours the shame! 

Clasp me, beauty, hug and press; 
Will you ever love me less? 
Better, howsoe'er it grieve us, 
Bury love than see it leave us. 
I could lay you low, Mignon, 
Knowing you were all my own, 
With a less reluctant heart 
Than to watch your love depart. 
Following from out my day 



MISCELIJ.ANY. 449 

Footsteps that have died away. 
O, my beautiful — my jewel! 
I was feeble, he was cruel ; 
His the baseness, mine the blame, 
Baby, baby, yours the shame! 

Kiss me darling, clasp me tight, 
Strain with all your baby' might; 
Something fond my nature misses, 
Yearns for love and gentle kisses. 
There! and there! and there, Petite! 
But your lips are pure and- sweet! 
Grant that mine be dead and gone 
Ere yours lisp a baby tone; 
They would surely "Papa" call; 
I must say — if say at all— 
O, my beautiful — my jewel! 
I was feeble, he was cruel ; 
His the baseness, mine the blame, 
Baby, baby, yours the shame! 

— Joseph T. Goodnmn, 



341. Thought. — It is true that cities and king- 
doms die, but the eternal thought lives on. Great 
thought, incorporate with great action, does not die, but 
lives a universal life, and its power is felt vibrating 
through all spirit and throughout all ages. — Gc7i. Jas. 
A. McDottQ-all. 



'^>' 



342. The Highest Gift of Mind. — The gift of 
expression, though not the highest, is next to the high- 



450 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

est gift. I conceive that the very highest gift of mind, 
and that which most contributes to the progress of man- 
kind, is the gift of invention. Next comes the gift of 
expression, which can take the new thought and intro- 
duce it to the work!, notwithstanding the prepossessions 
and hostihty of conservatism. Here is the magic in- 
fluence of eloquence. The man of commanding and 
universal influence is a man of a very high order of 
mind. He is born king among men, — Rev. IV. E. Ijains. 

343. Personal Power. — In the absence of a 
quality, material or acquired, there is always compensa- 
tion, if not complete, at least partial. Public speaking 
is an art which I have often coveted. To hold in rapt 
attention a thousand listeners whose presence and sym- 
pathy should feed fires radiating in dazzling conceits, is 
a fascination often arisinsf before the student of ardent 
longings, and most vividly of all in the mind of him in 
whom such talents are lamentably absent. Yet the 
rule is, to which I know there are exceptions, that the 
brilliant speaker is seldom the best scholar or the most 
profound thinker. 

It is told of the vocalist, Lablache, that by facial ex- 
pression he could represent a thunder-storm, in a most 
remarkable manner. The gloom which overshadowed 
the face, as clouds the sky, deepened into darkness, then 
lowered as an angry tempest. Lightning flashed from 
the winking eye, twitching the muscles of the face and 
mouth, and thunder shook the head. Finally the storm 
died away and the returning sun illumined the features, 
and wreathed the face in smiles. 



MISCELLANY. 451 

Sensitive as is the actor to the sympathy or indiffer- 
ence of his audience, the author is but little behind him. 
To talk or to write without being able to command the 
attention of the listener or reader, would stop the mouth 
and dry the pen about as quickly as anything. 

There is something irresistible in the tone and man- 
ner of an eloquent speaker; likewise in the glowing 
thoughts of a graceful writer — as in meeting a stran- 
ger, w^e are at first attracted by the dress and polish 
which conceal character, rather than by qualities of the 
head and heart of which we know nothing. But since 
science now so often strips from the shell of things 
their soft and comely covering, history is no longer 
willing to sacrifice life for meat, or the body for raiment. 

— Hubert H. Bancroft. 

344. Epigrams. 

If every Jack should mate his Jill, 
What gills of Jacks this world would fill. 

A dangerous rock is intellect. 

On which the wisest oft are wrecked. 

Nature. from many a rough-hewn log 
Has made a rougher pedagogue. 

A man who's leaner than a hawk 
Often contains a ton of talk. 

Nothing in nature is so dense 

As what is known as common sense. 

Times are so hard — so Stubbs confesses — 
He cannot now pay his addresses. 



452 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

Of Jockeys Adam was the first — 
This fact is vouched by pundits, versed 
In lore historic — him they place 
As Father of the Human Race! 

Love, like a sausage, always needs 
From him or her who on it feeds — 
What is of utmost consequence 
To its enjoyment — confidence. 

Though Wisdom mankind lightly prize 
They rarely fail to idolize 
A downright fool, when, richly rolled 
"" Like Israel's calf, he shines in gold. 

Beware of what is called a prude; 
Peaches are bad when over-o-ood. 

Position does not merit show; 
The larofest birds oft nestle low: 
While tiny insects rest so high 
They're unseen by the keenest eye. 

— Hcdoi'- A. Shiart- 

345. Organization. — An organization is far 
greater than an idea, for a principle is always connected 
with it; but it is a corporeal idea — a principle in action. 
And what is grander in the domain of awful effects ? 
Until tims clothed, an idea is powerless, and bears about 
the same analogy to its active operations as does a 
shadowy ghost to a sturdy man. 

A crystalized gem is the most attractive form of solid 
matter, because more thought and skill are expended 
in its structure than in any other stony combination of 



MISCELLANY. 453 

atoms. A flower is of a higher order of charm, for 
more various and n>ore subtle elements are wrought into 
its composite loveliness ; and then the provisions for 
the growth and support of the flower affect us more pro- 
foundly still — the mixture of the air, the various powers 
hidden in the sun ray, the alternation of day-light 
and gloom, the laws of evaporation and of clouds, and 
the currents in the air that carry moisture from zone to 
zone for the nutriment of vegetation. We soon find in 
nature that no element or force exists unrelated. It is 
in harness with other elements, for a common labor, 
and an interchange of service for a common end. 
Organization is the idea which science impresses upon 
us as the secret of life, health, power, and beauty in 
her realm. But the great glory of organization is when 
it is revealed in human life. The highest structure of 
the creative art is the body of man, representing in its 
complexity and the friendly partnership of its powers, 
the system and co-ordination which society should at- 
tain; and it is a marked epoch in history when a new 
movement is made which succeeds in organizing men, 
widely and permanently, for noble and beneficent ends. 

T/los. Starr King. 

346. History. — History is a magician's bottle out of 
w^iich we can pour any kind of wine the human appetite 
craves. Sophocles pictured humanity as it ought to be. 
Euripides as it was. Thucydides wrote down democ- 
racy; Tacitus, imperialism. Was either of them true 
to the interests of the opposite side? Would they not 
have been accounted by their respective parties traitor- 



454 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

OLis fools had they been wholly impartial, and would not 
their names and works have soon perished in conse- 
quence? Macaulay looks upon the ills of the English 
poor two centuries back; Cobbett and Hallam dwell 
more upon their comforts. Read one and you would 
imagine them the most unhappy of mortals; read the 
others and you would think how much happier they 
were then than now. To the character of Philip II, 
Prescott applies the words, bigoted, perfidious, suspi- 
cious, cruel, which were enough even for so powerful a 
prince; but when Motley adds to these the terms, pe- 
dant, and idiot, one begins to wonder how such a 
driveller was able to manage his estate of half a world 
so long and so well. — Hubert //. Bancroft. 

THE STUDY OF MANKIND.. 

347. The tendency of philosophic inquiry is more 
and more toward the origin of things. In the earlier 
stages of intellectual impulse the mind is almost wholly 
absorbed in ministering to the necessities of the pres- 
ent; next, the mysterious uncertainty of the after life 
provokes inquiry, and contemplations of an eternity of 
the future command attention; but not until knowledge 
is well advanced does it appear that there is likewise 
an eternity of the past worthy of careful scrutiny — 
without which scrutiny, indeed, the eternity of the 
future must forever remain a sealed book. Standing, 
as we do, between these two eternities, our view limited 
to a narrow though gradually widening horizon, as 
nature unveils her mysteries to our inquiries, an infinity 



MISCELLANY. 455 

spreads out in either direction, an infinity of minuteness 
no less than an infinity of immensity ; for hitherto 
attempts to reach the ultimate of molecules have proved 
as futile as attempts to reach the ultimate of masses. 
Now man, the noblest work of creation, the only reason- 
inof creature, standincj alone in the midst of this vast 
sea of undiscovered truth — ultimate knowledge ever 
receding from his grasp, primal causes only thrown 
farther back as proximate problems are solved — man, 
in the study of mankind, must follow his researches in 
both of these directions, backward as well as forward, 
must indeed derive his whole knowledge of what man 
is and will be, from what he has been. Thus it is that 
the study of mankind, in its minuteness, assumes the 
grandest proportions. Viewed in this light there is 
not a feature of primitive humanity without significance; 
there is not a custom or characteristic of savage na- 
tions, however mean or revolting to us, from which 
important lessons may not be drawn. It is only from 
the study of barbarous and partially cultivated nations 
that we arc able to comprehend man as a progressive 
being;", and to recoc^nize the successive stages throucrh 
which our savage ancestors have passed on their way 
to civilization. With the natural philosopher there ii> 
little thought as to the relative importance of the mani- 
fold works of creation. The tiny insect is no less an 
object of his patient scrutiny than the wonderful and 
complex machinery of the cosmos. The lower races 
of men, in the study of humanity, he deems of as 
essential importance as the higher; our present higher 
races being but the lower types of generations yet to 
come. — Hubert H. Bancroft. 

31 



456 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 



THE PIONEER. 

348. The gallant Pioneer! He is the noblest type 
of American manhood, for he has 

"Honor and courage; 
Qualities that eagle-plume men's souls 
And fit them for the sun." 

He climbs like a huge fly upon the bald skull of 
some lofty mountain, and the primeval hills welcome 
his daring footsteps. He taps with the prospector's 
pick at the adamantine doors of the earth's treasure 
chambers, and at his demand they reveal their shin- 
ing secrets. His glittering ax lays low the green- 
plumed forest monarch, and on the surface of the emer- 
ald-hued prairies he marks the sites of cities yet to be. 
Not for him the science of the school, not for him the 
graces of culture, not for him the joys of home, not for 
him the sweet solaces of life. But he reads the story 
of the ages written on the rocks, and hears the tale of 
mysterious forces whispered by the mid-night stars, and 
the priest-robed mountains, and the smiling lakes, and 
white-lipped sunset seas are his palaces and his kindred. 
Southward you shall behold him, undaunted by the roar 
of the Colorado, or the stealthy step of the Apache, 
pressing onward and still onward to listen to the wash 
of tropic waters. Northward his resolute face is 
turned toward the wooing mountains of crystal, until 
the North Star gleams like a mighty diamond in its 
gold and crimson setting of northern lights, and the 
sullen sun but for an hour hangs upon the verge of the 



MISCELLANY. 457 

polar night, a faint reminder of the lost southern clime 
while the booming artillery of the Ice King hails the 
Pioneer of polar seas. Westward — ah! there is no 
longer a west. The iron lace with which progress 
frintjes her "garments reaches now to where the Golden 
Gate swings back upon her hinges. Asia and the far- 
ther Indies are just beyond, and the Orient of Europe 
is the Occident of America. 

And still from the silver and the orange blossom of 
cactus-fringed and snow-crowned Mexico, northward to 
where the icebergs glitter against an Arctic sky, our 
Pioneers are marching and toiling. In the track which 
their fierce feet are breaking, our country is marching 
onward to her greatness. The army of civilization 
swells upon their pathway. Art, Science, Progress, the 
Wealth of Nations, the Power and Glory of the Re- 
public, follow. All honor and all hail to those brave 
hearts who lead the vanguard. — Thomas Fitch. 



TRANSITION. 

349.— 

W^hen leaves grow sere, all things take sombre hue, 
The wild winds waltz no more the woodsides through. 
All day the faded grass is wet with dew. 

A gauzy nebula films the pensive sky, 

The golden bee buzzes supinely by, 

In silent flocks the bluebirds southward fly. 



458 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

The cynic frost is riotous of blame, 

The forests' cheeks are crimsoned o'er with shame^ 

The ground with scarlet blushes is aflame! 

The one we love grows lustrous-eyed and sad, 
With sympathy too thoughtful to be glad, 
While all the colors round are running mad. 

The sunbeams kiss askant the tawny hill, 
The naked woodbine climbs the window sill, 
The air the noons exhale is faint and chill. 

The ripened nuts drop downward day by day-. 
Sounding the hollow tocsin of decay, 
And bandit squirrels smuggle them away. 

Vague sighs and scents pervade the atmosphere,. 
Sounds of invisible stirrings hum the ear. 
The morning's lash reveals a frozen tear. 

The hermit mountains gird themselves with mail,, 
Mocking the threshers with an echo flail, 
The while the afternoons grow cold and pale. 

Inconstant Summer to the tropics flees. 

And, as her rose-sails catch the amorous breeze, 

Lo! bare, brown Autumn trembles to her knees. 

The stealthy nights encroach upon the days, 
The earth with sudden whiteness is ablaze, 
And all her paths are lost in crystal maze! 

Tread lightly where the tender violets blew — 
Where, to Spring winds their soft eyes open flew; 
Safely they'll sleep the churlish Winter through. 



MISCELLANY. 459 

Though all Life's portals are indiced with woe, 
And frozen pearls are all the world can show, 
Feel! Nature's breast is warm beneath the snow! 

With blooms full-lapped again will smile the land, 
The pall is but the folding of His hand, 
Anon with fuller glories to expand! 

The dumb heart hid beneath the wintry tree 
Will throb again; so shall the torpid bee 
Drone on the listening ear his drowsy glee. 

So shall the truant bluebirds backward fly. 
And all loved things that vanish or that die 
Return to us in some sweet by-and-by. 

— W. A. Ke'udall. 



THE HUMAN MIND. 

350. The resources of the human mind and the 
energies of the human will are illimitable. From the 
time when the new philosophy, of which Francis Ba- 
con was the great exponent, became firmly written in 
a few minds, the course of human progress has been 
unfettered — each established fact, each new discovery, 
each complete induction, is a new weapon from the 
armory of truth; the march cannot retrograde; the 
human mind will never go back; the question as to a 
return to barbarism is forever at rest. If Eno-land 
were to sink beneath the ocean, she has planted the 
germ of her thought in many a fair land beside, and 
the tree will shadow the whole earth. If the whole 



460 CALIFORNIA ANTHOLOGY. 

population of America were to die in a day, a new mi- 
gration would re-people it, not with living forms alone, 
but with living thought, bright streams from the foun- 
tains of all nations. 

We turn with wonder and delight to behold on every 
hand the results of scientific method everywhere visi- 
ble and everywhere increasing; but amid that wonder 
and delight, we turn to a still greater wonder — the 
human mind itself. Who shall now stay its progress? 
What shall impede its career.^ No longer trammeled 
by theories or oppressed by the despotism of authority, 
grasping, at the very vestibule, the key to knowledge, 
its advance, though gradual, is but the more sure. It 
is engaged in a perpetual warfare, but its empire is 
perpetually enlarging. No fact is forgotten, no truth 
is lost, no induction falls to the ground. It is as in- 
dustrious as the sun — it is as restless as the sea — it is 
as universal as the race itself — it is boundless in its am- 
bition, and irrepressible in its hope! 

And yet, in the very midst of the great works that 
mark its progress, while we behold on every hand the 
barriers of darkness and ignorance overthrown, and 
perceive the circle of knowledge continually widening, 
we must forever remember that man, in all his pride of 
scientific research, and all his power of elemental con- 
quest, can but follow at an infinite distance, the methods 
of the Great Designer of the Universe. His research 
is but the attempt to learn what nature has done or 
may do; his plans are but an imperfect copy of a half- 
seen original. He strives, and sometimes with success, 



MISCELLANY. 



461 



to penetrate into the workshop of nature; but whether 
he use the sunbeam, or steam, or electricity — whether 
he discover a continent or a star — whether he decom- 
pose Hght or water — whether he fathom the depths of 
the ocean or the depths of the human heart — in each 
and all he is but the imitator of the Great Architect 
and Creator of all things. — Gen. E. D. Baker. 




INDEX. 



[the figures befer to the paragraph numbers.] 



"Affection, Forgiveuess, Faith," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 137 

"Agassiz, Louis," 

W. H. Dall 247 

"Agriculture," 

Samuel B. Bell 147, 160, 162 

James G. Howard 156 

Thos. Starr King. . .148, 150, 152, 
158, 163. 

Zachary Montgomery 154 

W. H. Rhodes 153 

Tod llobinson 155 

Leiand Stanford 161 

Joseph W. Winans 151 

"All Does Not Fade," 

Rev. Wm. Speer 82 

"American Legion of Honor," 

See ' ' Fraternal Societies, " . . . . 245 

"Ancient Order of United Workmen," 

Philip M. Fisher 244 

See "Fraternal Societies,". . . .245 

Anderson, Rev. T. H. B. 

"Books," 47 

"Cliildren," 92 

"Labor," 109 

"Architecture," 

Frank Tilford 27 

"Art " 

W. C. Bartlett 25 

John W. Dwindle 26 

Prof. Joseph LeConte 22 

Dr. A. B. Stout 23 

Frank Tilford 27 

E.G. Waite 24 

"Asceticism," 

W. C. Bartlett 93 

"Atheism," 

Thos. Starr King 138 

"Atlantic Cable, The," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 302 

Judge E. D. Wheeler 303 

"Authorship in California," 

W. C. Bartlett 301 

"A Pressed Flower," 

G. C. Hurlbut 324 



Baker, Gen. E. D., 

"Affection, Forgiveness, Faith." 137 

"The Atlantic Cable," 302 

"The Comet of 1858," 327 

"The Human Mind," 350 

" The Law, Bench and Bar," . . .312 

"Tiae Press," 42 

•' Dueling," 165 

" Freedom," 195, 199 

"Politics," 180 

"Our Country," 220 

"Science," 1 

"War," 202 

"Etc," 57 

"Baker, Gen. E. D.," 

Samuel B. Bell 251 

Newton Booth 248 

Gen. J. A. McDougall 250 

Mrs. James Neale 249 

Baldwin, Judge Joseph G., 

"Stephen J. Field," 261 

" Aaron Bun-, " .... 256 

"Baldwin, Jo.seph G.," 

Judge Stei^hen J. Field. 252 

Bancroft, Hubert H., 

" The Brave Days of Old," 77 

"California," 292 

"Catholicity of Spirit, " 168 

"Home," 87 

"History," 340 

" Labor," 107, 108, ll'J, ) 13 

"Personal Power," 343 

" Popular Corruption," 166 

"Riches," 97, 99 

"Social Advance," 171 

"The Study of Mankind,". . . .347 
"Etc," 35, 59 

Barnes, Gen. W. H. L., 

"Recuperative Power of our Na- 
tion," 215 

Barstow, George, 

"Death." 321 

" Freedom," 194 

"Home," 88 

"War," 200 



464 



INDEX. 



Bartlett, W. C, 

"Art,".. 25 

' ' Asceticism, " 93 

"Authorship in California,". . . .301 

"Books," 46 

"Gardening," 149 

"Wine," 173 

"The Press," 41 

"California Humorists," 300 

Bausman, William, 

"The Pen," 37 

Bell, Samuel B., 

"Agriculture," 147, 160, 102 

" Gen. E. D. Baker," 251 

Bennett, Judge N., 

"Modern Civilization," 170 

" The Common and Civil Law," . . 314 
Bierce, A. G., 

" Science," 18 

Bonte. Eev. J. H. C, 

" Men of Thought and Men of 

Action, " 85 

"Books," 

Eev. T. H. B. Anderson 47 

W. C. Bartlett 46 

Sarah B. Cooper 48 

Thos. Starr King. . .44, 45, 49, 50 
Booth, Newton, 

" Capital and Labor," 184, 186 

" The Ilepublic of Letters," .... 39 

"Odd Fellowship," .238 

"War," 203 

"Our Country," 206 

"Gen. E. D. Baker," 248 

"Brave Days of Old, The," 

Hubert H. Bancroft 77 

Briggs, Kev. M. C, 

"The Church and Nation," 128 

"Broderick, David C," 

John W. Dwindle 253 

Frank Soule 254 

Browne, J. Pioss, 

"Eiches," 100 

"The Gardens of the Peterskoi,".164 
Bunker William M., 

" The Modoc Stronghold," 298 

Burnett, Peter H., 

' ' Education, " 30 

"Burns, Eobert," 

Geoi'ge Gordon 255 

"Burr, Aaron," 

Joseph G. Baldwin 256 

" California : Authorship in," 

W. C. Bartlett 301 

"California: A Girlish Cleopatra," 
H. H. Bancroft 292 



" CaJifomia : Acquisition of," 

Edmund Eandolph 389 

"California: Her Duty and Destiny," 

Judge T. W. Freelon 294 

Judge E. W. McKinstry 295 

"California Humorists," 

W. C. Bartlett 300 

"California Pioneers," 

Edmuud Eandolph 290 

" Calif orniana," 280 to 301 

"Capital and Labor," 

Newton Booth 184, 186 

Henry George 183, 221 

Jas. McM. Shafter 185 

Eev. H. Stebbins 187 

Casserly, Eugene, 

" Our Country," 214 

"Washington," 286 

" Catholicity of Spirit," 

Hubert H. Bancroft 168 

" Cause (the) Calls forth the man," 
Henry George 175 

" Centennial Oration, 1876," 

Eev. H. Stebbins 222 

" Charity," 

Francis J. Sullivan 72 

"Chemistry," 

W. H. Ehodes 17 

"Children," 

Eev. T. H. B. Anderson 92 

Gen. John A. Collinsl89, 190, 191 

Henry George 91 

John Le Conte 188 

Zachary Montgomery 90 

Chas. H. Shinn 192 

"Chosen Friends, The Order of," 

See " Fraternal l^iocieties, " . . . . 245 

"Church and State," 

Eev. M. C. Briggs 128 

" Christ our Saviour," 

Edward Tompkins 119 

Thos. Starr King 127 

"Christianity," 

Eev. W. E. Ijams...ll7, 118, 141 

"Christmas," 

Chas. F. Craddock 337 

"Civilization, Modern," 

Judge N. Bennett 170 

Clarke, Chas. Eussell, 

"Thos. Starr King," 266 

"Clay, Webster and Calhoun," 

J. W. Winans 257 

Collins, Gen. John A. 

" Intemporaace, ' 102 

"Man'is Mission," 140 

" Popular Justice," 167 



INDEX. 



465 



Collins, Gen. John A., 

"The Rearing of Children,". .. .189 
190, 191. 

' ' Oilcl Fellowship, " 240 

"Comet of 1S58," 

Gea. E. D. Baker .327 

"Conservatives and Radicals," 

Thos. Starr King 174 

Coolbrith, Ilia D. 

"Discipline," 76 

" Coiitlict and Progress," 

Sa^uuel Williams 114 

"Conflict Eternal," 

Samuel Williams 83 

Cooper, Mrs. Sarah B. 

"Books," 48 

" Friendship," 94 

" The Tree of Love," 71 

"Woman," 331 

"Social Artifices," 169 

"Etc." 55, 60, 73 

Craddock, Chas. F., 

"Delilah," 3.35 

" Christmas," 337 

Crittenden, R. D. 

"Oar Country," 211 

Curtis, N. Greene, 

' ' Freemasonry, " 231 

Dall, W. H. 

"Death of Agassiz " 247 

Davidson, Prof. Geo. 

"Science," 7 

"Death," 

George Barstow 321 

Rev. F. C. Ewer 322 

Thos. Starr King 320 

Gen. J. A. McDougall 319 

Oscar T. Shuck 323 

"Decay of Empires," 

Thos. Starr King 177 

Deering, F. P. 

" Novels," 51 

"Delilah," 

C. F. Craddock 335 

" Dickens in Camp," 

F. Bret. Harte 258 

"Discipline," 

Ina D. Coolbrith 76 

" Distinguished Men," 246 to 286 

" Drawing," 

Dr. A. B. Stout 23 

"Drunk in the Street," 

Daniel O'Connell 104 

" Dueling," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 165 

"Durant, Henry," 

John B. Felton 259 



Martin Kellogg 260 

"Duty," 

Thos. Starr King 54 

Dwinelle, John W., 

" Sculpture," 26 

"David C. Broderick," 253 

"H. H. Haight,'' 2(J2 

" Sau Francisco," 297 

"Education," 

Newton Booth 39 

Peter H. Burnett 30 

Rev. F. C. Ewer 32 

John B. Felton 53 

B. B. Redding 31 

Rev. H. Stebbins 28 

Jos. W. Winans 29, 33, 35 

"El Rio Sacramento," 

Gen. L. H. Foote 296 

"Epigrams," 

Hector A. Stuart 344 

"Evolution," 

Prof. Jos. LeCoute 12, 13 

"Evolution and Materialism," 

Prof. Jos. LeConte 11 

"Evolution of Mind," 

Dr. A. B. Stout 36 

Ewer, Rev. F. C, 

"Death," 322 

"Teaching," ; 30 

' • Woman, " 332 

"Example, the Influence of," 

Henry George 81 

"Etc." 

Gen. E. D. Baker 57 

Hubert H. Bancroft 59, 135 

Sarah B. Cooper 55, 60, 73 

Rev. Dr. Thos. Guard 123 

Rev. W. E. Ijams 61, 75 

Thos. Starr King . .58, 62, 64, 77 
"Faith," 

T. W. Freelon 136 

"Farming," (see Agriculture.) 
' ' Farewell to Syria, " 

JohnF. Swift 325 

Felton, John B. 

" Freemasonry, " 232 

"God," 121 

" The Law, Bench and Bar," 307 

" Maximilian," 269 

" Napoleon Bonaparte," 272 

' ' Pleasures, Physical and iJental' 38 

" Science," 18 

" Sympathy," 95 

"The Suspicious Man," 81 

"Truth,".'. 86 

"Field, Stephen J." 

Jos. G. Baldwin 261 



4GG 



INDEX, 



Field, Stephen J. 

"Jos. G. Baldwin," 252 

"Edward Norton," 275 

" Law, Bench and Bar," 309 

Finney, ISelden J. 

" The Hpiritual Feeling," 144 

Fisher, Philip M. 

"The United Workmen," 244 

Fitch, Thomas, 

" Our Country," 204 

" The Order of Red Men." 243 

"The Pioneers," 348 

"The Press," 43 

" William C. Pvalston," 277 

Foote, Gen. L. H. 

' ' El Piio Sacramento, " 29G 

" Fraternal Societies," 223 to 245 

"Freedom," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 195, 199 

Geo. Barstow 194 

Henry George 197 

Dr. J. C. S'horb 193 

Joseph W. Winans 19G 

E. C. Winchell 198 

Freelon, Judge T. W., 

"Faith," 136 

"Our Country," 209 

" Our Duty and Destiny," 294 

*' Freemasonry," 

N. Greene Curtis 231 

John B. Felton 232 

Dr. H. M. Gray 228 

Henry E. Highton 233 

Thos. Starr King. . .223, 224, 225, 
226, 227. 

Milton S. Latham 230 

Frank Tilford 234, 2.35 

Samuel M. Wilson 229 

Fremont, Gen. John C, 

"Recrossing the Rocky JVIount- 

aius." 326 

"Free Trade," 

Henry E. Highton 181 

"Friendship," 

Sarah B. Cooper 94 

"Gardening," 

W. C. ^Bartlett 149 

Chas. H. Shinu 159 

"Gardens of Peterskoi," 

J. Ross Browne 164 

"Garibaldi and Washington," 

Dr. Franklin Tuthill. 288 

"(4enius," 

Thos. Starr King 338, 339 

Geor ;e, Henry, 

" Capital and Labor," 183 



"Children," 91 

"Freedom," 197 

"Immortality," 131 

" Influence of Example," 81 

" One-sided Progress," 176 

"Our Land Policy," 221 

"The Cause Calls the Man,". . . . 175 

"The Future Life," 146 

"Ghosts," 

Thos. Starr King 66 

"God," 

John B. Felton 121 

Thos. Starr King 116 

Pi-of. Jos. LeConte 125 

Goodman, Jos. T., 

"Over the Hill," 340 

Gordon, George, 

" Robert Burns," 255 

Gray, Dr. H. M., 

"Freemasonry," 228 

"Greatness," 

Thos. Starr King 78, 246 

Guard, Rev. Thos., (See Etc., 120) 

" Henry H. Haight," 

John W. Dwinelle 262 

Hallidie, A. S. 

"Labor," 106 

Hamilton, Rev. L. 

"Oscar L. Shafter," 278 

Harmon, John B. 

"Odd Fellowship," 241 

Harte, F. Bret, 

" Dickens in Camp," 258 

" Thos. Starr King," 205, 267 

"Harte, F. Bret," 

W. C. Bartlett 300 

Hayes, William, 

"Woman," 334 

Highton, Henry E. 

' ' Freemasonry, " 233 

"Flee Trade," 181 

"Woman," , 333 

"History," 

Hubert H. Bancroft 346 

"Holiness," 

Prof. Jos. LeConte 124 

"Holmes, Oliver Wendell," 

Henry H. Reid 263 

"Home," 

Hubert H. Bancroft 87 

Geo . Barstow 88 

Thos. Starr King 89 

Chas. H. Shinn 159 

"Horticulture," (See "Gai'deniug.") 
Howard, James G. 

' ' Fanning, " 156 



INDEX. 



467 



"Labor," 110 

" ^Marriage," 70 

" Human Temple, The," 

Thos. Starr King 79 

"Humorists of California," 

W. C. Bartlctt 300 

Hurlhut, (t. (J. 

" A Tressed Flower," 324 

Ijams, Eev. \V. E., 

•'Christianity," 117, 118, 141 

" Decline of Orthodoxy," 123 

" Emotional Ileligion," 122 

"Eeligion," 143 

' ' Woman, " 330 

" The Highest Gift of Mind," . .342 

(See also "Etc.,") Gl, 75 

"Immortality," 

Henry Ceorgc 131 

W. A. Kendall 133 

Thos. Starr King 129, 130 

Prof. Jos. LeConte 132 

"Infinity," 

Prof. Jos. LeConte 134 

"Intellectual Honesty," 

Rev. II. Stebbins 34 

"Intemperance," 

Gen. John A. Collins 102 

Daniel O'Connell 104 

Thos. Starr King 103 

Dr. A. B. Stout 101 

"Irish Race, The," 

Francis J. Sullivan 33G 

" Jcnner, Edward," 

Dr. J. C. Shorb 264 

"Justice," 

Frank Tilford G3 

Kellogg, Prof. Martin, 

" llenry Durant," 200 

Kendall, W. A.," 

" Immortality," 132 

" Transition," 349 

Kewen, Ccl. E. J. C, 

"John A. Sutter," 284 

King, Thomas Starr, 

"Agriculture," 148, 150, 152, 

158, 1G3. 

"Atheism," 138 

" Books," 44, 45, 49, 50 

"Conservatives and lladicals," . . 174 

Dying Words of 320 

"Decay of Empires," 177 

"Duty," 54 

" Freemasonry," 223, 224, 225, 

22G, 227. 

"Genius," 338, 339 

"Gliosis," G6 



"God," 116 

"Great Men," 246 

" Greatness," 78 

"Home," 89 

" Immortality," 129, 130 

"' Intemperance," 103 

"Life," <)6 

"Love," Co 

" National Character," 182 

"Nature," 315, 317 

" Noble Lives," G8 

" Novels," 52 

" Organization," 345 

" Originalitj^" 74 

" Our Moral Inheritance," 172 

" Prescott and Macaulay," 274 

" Revivals," 145 

"Riches," 98 

"Socrates," 281, 282 

"Style," 40 

" The Human Temple," 79 

" The Inner Life," 126 

" The Words of Christ," 127 

"Washington," 287 

(See also "Etc., "..58, 62, 64, 67)i 
"King, Thos. Starr, 

Chas. Russell- Clarke 266 

F. Bret Harte 265, 267 

"Labor," 

Rev. T. H. B. Anderson 109 

Hubert H. Bancroft 107, 108, 

112, 113. 

A. S. Hallidie 106 

James G. Howard : 110 

Jos. W. Winans Ill 

"Lafayette," 

INl'ilton S. Latham 268 

"Land and Land Policy, Our," 

Henry George 221 

" Law, Bench and Bar," . ... 206 to 314 
Latham, jNIilton S., 

' ' Freemasonry, " 230 

" Our Country," 2G7 

"Lafayette," 2G8 

' ' Science, " 3, 9 

LeConte, Prof. John, 

"The Rearing of Children," .... 188 
LeConte, Prof. Joseph, 

"Art," 22 

"Evolution," 12, 13 

"Evolution and Materialism,". . 11 

" Foreknowledge of God," 125 

"Holiness," 124 

"Immortality," 133 

"Infinity," 134 

"Science,". . . . 2, 4, 5, G, 10, 11, 15 



4G8 



INDEX. 



"Lessons of the Hour," 

Chas. H. Shinn 115 

"Life, The Conduct of," 54 to 115 

"Life, What it May Be." 

Thos. Starr King 96 

"Life, The Inner," 

Thos . Starr King 126 

"Life, This Leads to Another," 

Henry George 146 

" Literature and Education," 28 to 53 
"Love," 

Sarah B. Cooper 71 

Thos. Starr King 65 

"Macaulay and Prescott," 

Thos. Starr King 274 

"Mankind, Tiie Study of," 

Hubert H. Bancroft 347 

" Man's Mission," 

Gen. John A. Collins 140 

"Marriage," 

Jas. G. Howard 70 

Marshall, E. C. 

" California Pioneers," 291 

' ' Our Country, " 205 

"Masonry," (See " Freemasonry.") 
"Materialism," 

Dr. A. B. Stout 304 

McDonald, Dr. P. H. 

" Smoking," 105 

McDougall, Gen. James A., 

"Gen. E. D. Baker," 250 

"Death," 319 

"Thought," 341 

McKinstry, Judge E. W., 

"Our Duty and Destiny," 295 

"Medicine, the Science of," 

Dr. J. Campbell Shorb 305 

" Men of Thought and Men of Action," 

Ilev. J. H. C. Bonte 85 

"Mind, The Human," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 350 

"Mind, The Evolution of," 

Dr. A. B. Stout 36 

" Mind, The Highest Gift of," 

Rev. W. E. Ijams 342 

Montgomery, Zachary, 

"Children," • 90 

' ' The Farmer, " 154 

"Moore, Thomas," 

Francis J. Sullivan 270 

Oscar T. Shuck 271 

"Morality Essential to success," 

Dr. G. A. Shurtleff 80 

"Mulford, Prentice," 

W. C. Bartlett 300 



"Napoleon Bonajiarte," 

John B. Felton 272 

" National Character," 

Thos. Starr King 182 

"Nature," 

Thos. Starr King 315, 317 

Jas. McM. Shafter 316 

Chas. Warren Stoddard 318 

Neale, Mrs. James, 

"Gen. E. D. Baker," 249 

"Noble Lives," 

Tho . Starr King 08 

"Norton, Edward," 

Judge Stephen J. Field 275 

"Novels," 

F. P. Deering 51 

Thos. Starr King 52 

"Odd Fellowship," 

Newton Booth 238 

Gen. John A. Collins 240 

John B. Harmon 241 

Geo. Pv. Moore 237 

L. E. Pratt 242 

A. A. Sargent. . . ., 239 

Chas. A. Sumner 236 

"One-sided Progress," 

Henry George 176 

"Organization," 

Thos. Starr King 345 

"Originality," 

Thos. Starr King 74 

"Orthodoxy, Decline of," 

Eev. W. E. Ijams 123 

"Our Country," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 220 

Gen. W. H. L. Barnes 215 

Newton Booth 206 

Eugene Casserly 214 

R. D. Crittenden 211 

Thomas Fitch 204 

T. W. Freelon 209 

Milton S. Latham 207 

E. C. Marshall 205 

F. M. Pixley 216 

Rev. Dr. A. L. Stone 212 

J. H. Warwick.* 213 

Jos. W. Winans.208, 210, 217, 219 
E. C. Winchell 218 

"Our Moral Inheritance," 

Thos. Starr King 172 

O'Connell, Daniel, 

"Drunk in the Street," 104 

"Over the Hill," 

Jos, T. Goodman 340 



INDEX. 



469 



"Parker, Samuel," 

Chaa. A- Sumner 236 

"Patriotism," 

Hubert H. Bancroft 178 

Newton Booth 179 

" Pen, The," 

William Bausman 37 

" Personal Power," 

Hubert H. Bancroft ._ 343 

"Pioneers of California," 

E. C. Marshall 291 

Pixley, Frank M., 

"Our Country," 216 

" Plato " 

Dr.' J. Campbell Shorb 273 

Piatt, Ptev. AVm. H., 

"The Unity uf Laws," • 313 

"Pleasures, Physical and Mental," 

John B. Felton 38 

Poetry. — 
"Louis Agassiz," 

W. H. Dall 247 

"Gen. E. D. Baker," 

Mrs. Jas. Neale 249 

"Christmas," 

Chas. F. Craddock 335 

"Death," 

Oscar T. Shuck 323 

"Delilah," 

Chas. F. Craddock 337 

" Dickens in Camp," 

F. BretHarte 258 

"Discipline," 

Ina D. Coolbrith 76 

" Drunk in the Street," 

Daniel O'Connell 104 

"El Rio Sacramento," 

Gen. i.. IL Foote 296 

" Immortality," 

W. A. Kendall 133 

"On a Pressed Flower," 

G. C. Hurlbut 324 

"Over the Hill," 

Jos. T. Goodman 340 

" Eecrossingthe Pocky Mountains," 

Gen. J. C. Fremont 326 

" Thos. Starr King," 

Chas. Kussell Clarke 266 

F. Bret Harte 265, 267 

" Lessons of the Hour," 

Chas. H. Shinn 115 

"Thomas Moore," 

Oscar T. Shuck 271 

"The Mist," 

Miss H. M. Skidmore 328 



"The North Wind," 

Prof. E. R. Sill 329 

"Nature," 

Chas. Warren Stoddard 318 

" Science," 

A. G. Bierce 19 

"Sunrise from the Sierras," 

Chas. A. Sumner 293 

"Transition," 

W. A. Kendall 349 



" Politics, The Pursuit of," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 180 

" Popular Corruption," 

Hubert H. Bancroft 166 

' ' Popular Justice, " 

Gen. John A. Collins 167 

Pratt, L. E., 

"Odd Fellowship" 242 

Pratt, O. C, (See Law, Bench and 

Bar.) 311 

" Prescott and Macaulay, 

Thos. Starr King 274 

"Press, The," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 42 

W. C. Bartlett 41 

Thos. Fitch 43 

Profiatt, John, 

' ' The Law, Bench and Bar, " 308 

"Punctuality," 

Dr. G. A. Shurtleff 56 

" Pvadicals and Conservatives," 

Thos. Starr King 174 

"Ralston, William C," 

Thos. Fitch 277 

Dr. J. Campbell Shorb 276 

Randolph, Edmund, 

" The Acquisition of California, ".289 

"The California Pioneers," 290 

"Recuperative Power of the Na- 
tion," 

Gen. W. H. L. Barnes 215 

Redding, B. B., 

"Sanitary Influence of Trees,". . 157 

"Teaching," 31 

" Red Men, Order of," 

Thos. Fitch 243 

Reid, Henry H., 

" Law, Bench and Bar," 306 

"Oliver Wendell Holmes," 263 

"Republic of Letters, Tiie," 

Newton Booth 39 

"Revivals, The Corrupting Influenceof " 
Thos. Starr King 145 



470 



INDEX. 



"Heligion and The Future Life," 
116 to 146. 

"Keligion and Science," 

Bev. Dr. W. A. Scott 20 

Eev. Horatio Stebbius 21 

Ehodes, Wm. 11., 

"Apostrophe to Chemistry," .... 17 
"The Fanner," 153 

"lliches," 

Hubert H. Bancroft 97, 99 

J. llofcs Browne lUO 

Thos. Starr King 98 

Eobinaon, Tod, 

" The Farmer," 155 

"Eocky Mountains, Eecrossing," 

Gen. J. C. Fremont 326 

Royce, Josiah, 

"I'ercy Bysshe Shelley," 280 

" Eural Homes," 

Ciias. M. Sliiun 159 

" San Francisco," 

John W. Dwinelle 297 

Bargent, A. A. 

' ' Odd Fellowship, " 239 

" Sceptic, The," 

Dr. J. Campbell Shorb 142 

"Science," 

Gen. E. D. Baker 1 

A. G. Bierce 19 

Prof. Geo. Davidson 7 

John B. Felton IS 

Milton S. Latham 3, 9 

Prof. Jos. LeConte, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 
11, 15. 

W. H. Ehodes 17 

Osc&.- T. Shuck 16 

Eev. l.-oratio Stebbins 8 

" Science and Art," 

John V. Wattson 14 

"Science and Eeligiou," 

Eev. Dr. W. A. Scott 20 

Eev. Horatio Stebbins 21 

Scott, Eev. Dr. W. A. 

" Science and Eeligion," 20 

" Sculpture," 

John W. Dwinelle 26 

Shafter, Jas. McM. 

' ' Capital and Labor," 185 

"Communion v^ith Nature," ... .316 

"Shafter, Oscar L." 

Eev. L. Hamilton 278 

" Shakespeare," 

Frank Tilford 279 

Shattuck, Judge D. 0., 

(See "Law, Bench and Bar,"). 310 



" Shelley, Percy Bysshe," 

Josiah Eoyce 280" 

Shinn, Chas. H., 

" Lessons of the Hour," 115 

" Rural Homes, " 159 

"Hearing of Children," 192 

Shorb, Dr. J. Campbell, 

"Freedom," 193 

"Edward Jenner," 264 

"Plato," 273 

" William C. Ealston," 276 

"The Sceptic," 142 

"The Science of Medicine,". . . .305 

Shnck, Oscar T., 

"Thomas Moore," 271 

"Death," 323 

" FraternaHnsurance Societies, ".245- 
" Science," ~ 16 

Shurtiefi:', Dr. G. A., 

"Morality Essential to Success," 80 
' ' Punctuality, " 56 

Sill, Prof. E. E., 

" The North Wind," 329 

Skidmore, Miss H. M., 

"The Mist," 328 

" Smoking," 

Dr. E. H. ISIcDonald 105 

' ' Social Advance, " 

Hubert H. Bancroft 171 

' ' Social Artihces, " 

Sarah B. Cooper 169 

" Socrates," 

Thos. Starr King 281, 282 

Soule, Frank, 

" David C. Broderick," 254 

Speei', Eev. Wm., 

"All Does Not Fade,".^ 82 

" Spiritual Feeling, The," 

Selden J. Finney 140' 

Stanford, Leland, 

" Agi'iculture," 161 

Stanly, Edward, 

" Washington," 285 

Stebbins, Eev. Ploratio, 

" Capital and Lal>or," 187 

" Centennial Oration, 1876,". .. .222 

"Education," 28 

" Intellectual Honesty," 34 

"Science," 8 

" Science and Eeligion," 21 

Stoddard, Chas. Warren, 

"Nature," 318 

Stone, Eev. Dr. A. L., 

" Our Country," .212. 

Stout, Dr. A. B., 



INDEX, 



471 



" Drawing," 23 

" Evolution of Mind,". . . ^ .36 

" Intemperance," 101 

" Materialism," 304 

Stuart, Hector A., 

' ' Epigrams, " 344 

"Style," 

Thomas Starr Kiug 40 

Sullivan, Francis J., 

" Charity," 72 

" Thomas Moore," 270 

" The Irish Race," 330 

Sumner, Chas. A., 

"Odd Fellowship," 236 

" Sunrise from the Sierras,". . . .293 
"Sunrise from the Sierras," 

Chas. A . Sumner 293 

"Suspicious Man, The," 

John B. Felton 84 

" Sutter, John A," 

Col. E. J. C. Kewen 284 

Joseph W. Winans 283 

Swift, John F., 

" A Farewell to Syria," 325 

" Sympathy," 

John B. Felton 95 

" Teaching," 

J{ev. F. C. Ewer 32 

B. B. Redding 31 

"The Mist," 

Miss H. M. Skidmore 328 

"TheNoi-th Wind," 

E. R. Sill 329 

"Thought," 

Gen. J. A. McDougall 341 

"Thoughts, Let them Grow," 

M. J. Upham 69 

Tilford, Frank, 

" Architecture," .... 27 

" Freemasonry," 234, 235 

" Justice," 63 

' ' Shakespeare, " 279 

Tompkins, Edward, 

"Christ," 119 

" Trausiti<m," 

\V. A. Kendall 349 

" Trees, Sanitary Intluence of," 

B. B. Redding 157 

" Truth," 

John B. Felton 86 

Tuthill, Dr. Franklin, 

" Washington and (iaribaldi," . .288 



" Twain, Mark, ' 

W. C. Bartlett 300 

Upham, M. J., 

" Let Your Thoughts (irow,". . . 69 
Waite, E. G., 

"Art," 24 

"War," 

<Jen. E. D. Baker 202 

George Barstow 200 

Newton Booth 203 

Samuel Williams 201 

Warwick, J. H., 

" Our Country," 213 

" Washington," 

Eugene Cassei'ly .... : 286 

Thos. Starr King 287 

Edward Stanly 285 

" Washington and Garibaldi," 

Dr. Franklin Tuihill 288 

Wattson, John V., 

"Science and Art," 14 

Wheeler, Judge E. D., 

" The Atlantic Cable," 303 

"Wildey, Thomas," 

Charles A. Sumner 236 

Williams, Samuel, 

" Conflict and Progress," 114 

" Conflict Eternal," 83 

"War," 201 

Wilson, Samuel M., 

" Freemasoni-y, " 229 

Winans, .Joseph W., 

" Agriculture," 151 

"Clay, Webster and Calhoun, ".257 

" Education," 29, .33, 35 

" Freedom," 196 

' ' Labor, " Ill 

" Our Country,". .208, 210, 217, 219 

"Religion," 1.39 

" Gen. .John A. Sutter," 283 

"Wine," 

W. C. Bartlett 173 

Winchell, E. C, 

"Freedom," 198 

" Our Country," 218 

"Woman," 

.Sarah B. Cooper 331 

Kev. F. C. Ewer 3.32 

William Hayes . . 334 

Henry E. Highton 333 

Rev. W. E. Ijams .330 



